I suppose I'm obliged to talk briefly about how butter isn't actually bad for you and how natural saturated fats can actually be beneficial to your body and, maybe, even necessary for good health. I'll try to keep it short: In an earlier article on the topic of Saturated Fats, Cholesterol, and Heart Disease, I wrote about the misinformation concerning saturated fats (the family of fats that butter belongs to) and questioned the link between cholesterol and heart disease. Scientific studies that make a distinction between natural fats and processed fats show that previous evidence that linked fat consuming with obesity and heart disease may not be as straightforward as the commonly believed notion that fat consumption increases weight gain and the risk of heart disease. More and more often, as studies are being conducted more accurately (by not lumping processed fats with natural fats in the same category of study), it is being shown that there is either no correlation between natural fat consumption and obesity and in some cases an argument can be made that the consumption of natural fats can actually promote weight loss! Cholesterol has been "feared" in the last thirty years because it is suspected to be an indicator of heart disease. However, as study after study shows that blood serum levels of cholesterol are less accurate at indicating risk than a meteorologist is at predicting weather two weeks in advance. In fact, cholesterol is a fundamental building block of the human body necessary for proper operation of our brains, maintains a healthy digestive system, is a fundamental building block for many hormones, and serves as the body's main healing agent. It is in this capacity (as a healing agent) that has perhaps caused the most confusion in the understanding of how cholesterol works in the human body. When large amounts of cholesterol are found in the brain of someone afflicted with Alzheimer's disease or who has suffered a stroke, is the cholesterol the cause of the problem or is it there because the body is trying to fix a problem? Many researchers are beginning to believe that what is readily accepted in the medical community (that cholesterol contributes to heart disease, strokes, Alzheimer's, etc.) may in fact be a misinterpretation of the facts. Cholesterol is often found in the plaque that forms on the interior lining of arteries, but more and more researchers believe that the cholesterol is being used by the body to fix damage caused by other substances (such as polyunsaturated fats that have broken down releasing free radicals). Additional research has recently shown that the consumption of cholesterol helps to regulate blood serum cholesterol levels as well. Not only does feeding dietary cholesterol to individuals with low serum level increase their cholesterol, but feeding dietary cholesterol to those who have high cholesterol levels actually brings the level down. High serum level of cholesterol are typically caused by the body's overproduction of cholesterol and the dietary intake of cholesterol provides triggers to the body to reduce the excess production. It should also be noted that dietary cholesterol accounts for less than 1% of the cholesterol circulating in the blood and is less than 0.2% of the total body pool of cholesterol in the average person.
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Making butter is simple and easy (with modern appliances). You can churn the butter from cream in a blender, food processor, mixer, or even some bread machines. All you need is a machine or device that will agitate the cream so that the fat globules in the cream are destabilized. This causes the fat globules to start to clump. This clumping first enables tiny air bubbles to be trapped in the cream forming a relatively stable foam that we know of as whipped cream. When the agitation continues, the fat globules begin to clump so much that the air and fluid being help in place cannot be contained any longer. The foam seizes and the fat network begins to break down into large fat clusters that we call butter. In this example, I'll use a standing mixer to produce almost a pound of butter.
Start by pouring heavy cream into the bowl of a standing mixer. In this example, I started with a quart of heavy whipping cream. Traditionally, butter is made from soured cream. The milk is allowed to sit for a long time (perhaps a week) and the cream is skimmed off regularly to build up enough cream for churning. During this process, acids are formed as the cream sours. These acids help to break down the fat globules during churning so that they can stick to each other - thus aiding the creation of butter. The acids also provide a flavor to the butter that we no longer enjoy with manufactured butter. Since we are using an electric appliance to churn the butter for us, it's not necessary to sour the cream prior to butter making. However, for stronger flavor, you can add a tablespoon (15 mL) of store bought cultured buttermilk to each cup (235 mL) of cream used. Let sit for about 12 hours at room temperature before beginning the butter making process.
Start the mixer with the whisk attachment on low speed (to avoid splatter) and progress to medium speed as the liquid begins to thicken. At this stage, the cream drips in long thick strings.
Increase the speed to medium-high or high (if the cream allows that without splattering). Just a short while longer will bring the whipped cream to what is known as soft peaks. At this point, dipping and withdrawing a whisk or other implement (such as your finger) from the cream will form a sharp rise in the cream that has a drooping tip. This is referred to as forming soft peaks. Whipped cream in this stage is often used for baked goods and usually involves folding the cream into another mixture.
The next stage that the cream enters happens very quickly. The cream begins to form stiff peaks (when an implement is dipped and withdrawn, the peaks that are forms stand up straight without drooping). This is typically the target stage for whipping whipped cream. Whipped cream that forms stiff peaks is often used as a topping for fruit, pies, beverages, and anything else you can think of. (Try adding a little horseradish and serving with prime rib). This picture shows the cream just past when stiff peaks begin to form. To avoid overwhisking, it's often a good idea to whip the cream to soft peaks and then take it to stiff peaks with a hand whisk.
Next up, is a stage for which I do not know the name (or even if there is one). It's just past stiff peaks where the cream just begins to crinkle up. This is when the cream is about to seize and become butter. The color of the cream also takes on a very pale yellow color. This stage is a favorite of mine for topping cakes and cupcakes. I like how it's not as airy as regular whipped cream and has a rich, full flavor. You can "save" the cream from entering the butter stage by adding more cream and whisking it back into stiff peaks. It won't be quite the same as if you stopped at stiff peaks, but it should suffice.
A few seconds later, the mixer should churn the cream into butter. This happens quickly and rapidly - the cream suddenly seizes and buttermilk floods out while pellets of yellow butter form. You'll want to slow down your mixer at this point to prevent slashing the buttermilk all over your kitchen.
The amount of liquid that is expelled as the butter begins to mash together into a larger lump is considerable. At this point, it's best to remove the buttermilk (you can reserve it for use in baking recipes - use as if it was whole milk, not buttermilk) and keep mixing a bit longer. The buttermilk is only about as acidic as regular milk because we did not sour the cream before churning. You can approximate store bought buttermilk (which is actually cultured buttermilk) by adding a little lemon juice, but it won't be quite the same. Also, our butter milk has a bit more fat than the 1% fat cultured buttermilk sold in the supermarket.The butter should be washed to remove as much of the butter milk as possible. This can be done by placing the butter in a bowl with cold water and kneading the butter. When the water discolors, pour it out and more cold water. Not washing the butter will result in butter that my go rancid because of the buttermilk.
At this point, the butter can be wrapped and frozen or refrigerated for storage. But why not keep working it a little? Continuing to whisk the butter at high speed will start to beat in some air making the butter a little lighter and smoother.
Additional ingredients can be added to make new kinds of butter. Salted butter can be made by whipping 1/4 teaspoon table salt to every 4 ounces (115 g) of butter. Other popular additions are herbs and garlic. Use about 1 clove of garlic, finely minced, for every 4 ounces of butter (or more if you like garlic). For herbed butter, I use about 2 Tbs. of dried herbs for every 4 ounces of butter. In this example, I used an even mixture of dried basil, parsley, tarragon, and crushed rosemary.
Once you're done whipping your butter, measure out reasonable portions (I like going with the U.S. standard of 4 ounces per stick) onto separate pieces of wax paper or plastic wrap. Roll the butter into cylinders and twist and close the ends. Slip them into the freezer or refrigerator for future use.Of the 32 ounces of heavy cream I started with, I ended up with 14 ounces of buttermilk and 14 ounces of butter. I assume the other four ounces were buttermilk rinsed away during the washing phase.
With enough sugar in the child, this is very effective and takes just a couple of minutes. Keeps them busy too.
Quick question, is heavy cream the same as double cream?
Whole milk - 3.6% (depending on breed and diet)
Half-and-half - 10-15%
Single cream - 18%
Light whipping cream - 30%
Heavy whipping cream - 36%
Double cream - 42% (some countries as high as 50%)
In any case, double cream has a lot more fat, and so will be easier to churn into butter (and really easy to overwhip when making whipped cream).
I also agree with you about the butter, I would much rather have a bit of yummy butter, than heaps of horrible margarine (yuck)
Fats is a pretty complicated topic, but I think that's a great idea. I have a table of smoke points already, but I think I can focus on a variety of popular cooking fats and their nutrition, affect on the body, etc. It has now been added to my to-do list.
Micheal,
In regard to the "heavy cream" I can only find half and half, coffee, and whipping cream designations in the stores? Is heavy cream whipping cream? (30%MF) ?
Also for a future article....
I often wondered the differences between olive oil, light, extra light, virgin, extra virgin designations.... could you please shed some light on when to use which kinds, or if there is "quality" differences between them? Someone told me use only extra virgin as a salad dressing but cook (heat) only regular or light? Any background, scientific or otherwise would be appreciated!
GREAT site! keep up the good work!
Martin.
Great shots of the mixer!
No sarcasm, really...what digital camera do you use to get such great exposure and resolution?
I don't think we'll be making butter soon, but we have recently started making a mayo for potato salad. It's a big hit, except with the Hobart mixer operators.
Thanks for a serious yet fun website on cooking -- the scientific way.
Except.. How do I find a cream wholesaler?
Like, what would I look up in the yellow pages to find something like this? I'm just drooling over the idea of buying a half gallon of cream, but no idea where to look. On that note. Anyone know of a good place to get ridiculously large containers of cream or mascarpone in the Berkeley, CA area? Thanks!
Ah, exactly what I was wondering myself.
-Elizabeth
I learnt to make butter from my grandmother and mom. We would skim the cream off of milk and from the yoghurt we made. I guess the little bit of yoghurt that creeps in to the cream helped give the butter some flavor (like the soured cream you mention).
While I won't deny that there's a certain satisfaction that comes from making things from as scratch as possible, can other people taste a difference?
www.UdoErasmus.com
Teresa
My father who owned a tiny dairy was resourceful. He collected the cream and made butter. How? He sterilized our wringer washer ( very old laundry technology) with several bleach washes and boiling water rinses. He poured gallons of cream into the sanitized washtub. He turned on the washer and the centrifuge churned the cream into pounds of yellow butter. We stashed the pounds into the freezer and had fresh butter for three years!
My guess is that the marble helps agitate the cream while you shake it. It might reduce your shaking time - or it might not make a noticable difference (or a bad shake may break the mason jar...)
I managed to find real cream at the farmer's market, and it doesn't have any additives, works well, cultures well, and I can get an entire quart for the same price I was paying for a pint of grocery store "cream."
Pasteurization makes some difference in flavor if you're going to culture the butter--raw milk has a slightly different blend of bacteria than an add-your-own culture. UHT milk, as noted above, often won't culture at all. You can buy culture starter at a healthfood store, or you can use PLAIN live-culture yogurt to start the culture (Stonyfield Farm whole-milk is the best commercial yogurt, and it even comes with a nice thick layer of cultured cream on top--yummy).
Lurpak is a very good, although expensive, salted butter (it's in a silver foil wrapper and is usually found with the specialty cheeses). Kerrygold is also good, and expensive. Horizon Organic makes a decent butter (supposedly they also have a cultured butter, but I haven't seen it yet). If you can track down a local farmer who makes butter, it is usually superior to anything in the store.
I believe only one person stated that ultra-homogenized cream would not form butter. I don't know if this is true, but just check the ingredients list on your container of heavy cream to see if it contains anything besides cream. If it does, you probably don't want to be making butter with it any.
The other individuals who mentioned ultra-pasteurized were talking about cultering the cream (growing bacteria) prior to making butter for better flavor. You'll have a tough time doing that with ultra-pasteurized cream unless you introduce your own bacteria colony. However ultra-pasteurized does come together to form butter without any problems.
thanks!
The marble was more of an auditory clue that butter was forming, as I recall. Shake until you can't hear it rattle, and you've got butter.
thank you very much
heyam
my email:
heyam_1974@yahoo.com
Ive always thought the things healthiest for you will go bad quickly, and those that stay aren't so nutritious. I like your statement that butter is not bad for you, another option you didn't mention is mixing some other oil with the butter to increase other variations of fatty acids but yet have the butter taste and texture. Some examples I have tried are Grapeseed oil, Olive oil and Rice bran oil, each of these I have added without changing the taste of the butter dramatically.
smilesalot@mindspring.com
In my opinion, making butter from milk is too long of a process to be worth it. You'll need to let the cream rise, skim it, and let the collected cream sit for about a day. Drain the liquid and whip it for a bit (thirty minutes or more) and let sit. Drain and repeat until the cream starts to clump up and form butter.
I just bought a carton of 500ml 35% whipping creme, regular stuff, put it in a bowl, turned on my mixer, followed these instructions, and wow I now have fresh yummy butter!
I won't buy butter again. Reason? For some reason here in Montreal whipped butter is almost impossible to find. I love whipped butter. This stuff is great. I did find that it did not turn yellowish at all, but other than that, no difference. Good description and instructions!
Start with 1 quart heavy cream. Shake it gently--more rocking than shaking--until it stops sloshing at all. This will take some time but it's easy. I did it off and on, over a period of a couple of hours, in a house at 78 degrees (warmer than some procedures recommend).
Open the cap on the side of the carton and pour out about 1/3 of the cream (you'll put it back later). This is just to get air space. It should be a smooth thick liquid, almost pudding. Now, close the carton and shake vigorously. In just a minute or two, the creamy liquid will start to stiffen up, rather abruptly. Give it just a few more really hard shakes, and in seconds, it starts to separate; it'll go from sloshing to muddy to almost a crackling sound as the buttermilk frees up.
Shake it a few more seconds to get all the butter out of the buttermilk. Then open the carton, pour out the buttermilk, and pour the rest of the cream back in. Repeat the vigorous shaking, and pour out the second batch of buttermilk.
Now you can pour in water, shake vigorously, and pour it out again, a few times, to rinse the butter. When you're done, just cut open the carton and scrape out the butter. It made close to two cups.
Chris
Anyways, I added the celery salt. Now I have funky tasting cream (It never really turned into decent whipping cream, either. sigh...). So I experimented with a little bit of it in a quart jar in the microwave, just to see what it would do. At three minutes on high the stuff boiled off a LOT of water content, or milk, or whatever. It reduced to about a third of it's size, and I saw yellow globs in there. Hmmm... curious. I put it all in the fridge for the night because I was pooped.
So the next morning there are still a few globs in the microwaved concoction, but they are now white again. Go figure. I abandoned that batch. The funky tasting celery salt concoction is still in a bowl in the fridge.
So I'm in here in my bedroom shaking this mason jar full of plain ole whipping cream, thinking that it's not going to work because I'm reading about all the difficulties of ultra-pasteurized or stuff with those extra chemicals in it, and I'm thinking, ok, it's about time to stuff this stuff in the fridge and hit the hay. I open the jar for about the fourth time, thinking I'm going to have some bubbles in my whipping cream, and I find that.... I have about a cup amount of butter floating in my cream! I had this quart mason jar about 3/4 full and it took me about an hour of constant shaking, but here it is.
So I stuck with the jar thing because I seem to remember that's how my Grama did it when they worked at the dairy. She used to skim the cream off the gallon of milk they dipped out of the milk tank (straight from the cow) and brought home. Then she filled up 4 or 5 mason jars and all of us, grownups and kids alike, would shake a jar of the stuff while we were watching a movie together. Then Grama had baked bread too (I can still remember it's drop dead delicious flavor, too- gotta love Grama's Southern fat filled cookin') and we had some on some warm bread.
So now I know how to make soap and butter. The sky's the limit!
If anybody knows of any places where I can buy milk straight from the dairy or cow before it gets stuffed full of crap, uh, I mean... chemicals, and boiled to death, I would much appreciate an email: notasnowballs_chanceinhell@yahoo.com
Oh yea: Nutritional info on the thing I was shaking around:
Brand name: Darigold ultra-pasteurized whipping cream, one quart
Serving size for nutritional facts: one tablespoon or 15 ml
Fat calories are 40
Total fat is 4.5 g
Saturated fat is 3 grams or 7 %
Trans Fat is 0 g or 0%
Hope that helps, and please drop me an email, I plan on making more butter because I heard from my diet friends that now the health folks are saying that instead of margarine being good for you and butter is bad, now they have switched and said that margaraine is REALLY bad for you (cholesterol, heart disease, etc.) and that butter has "good" fats, that you need. I wish those idiots up there running things would make up their minds. Personally, I think God gave us what we need to survive in this world, and man is really good at screwing it up. I think I will try to stick to food that is natural as possible and to heck with the FDA or whoever makes those rules. According to all the experts, I'm gonna' die anyways. LOL
I was just wondering if I wanted to make a medium size jar at home with my daughter for fun. How much heavy cream or double cream I should use and if i wanted to sweeten it up a bit with some sugar (so my daughter will eat it) how much sugar should i use. I dont have any type of food processor or mixer except a blender and a electric hand mixer so I was going to take the plastic jar approach with a marble or something for an agitator. Unless i could use a blender or something lol. If someone could help me out I would appreciate it thanks.
Amber H.
I made the butter with a whisk and a mixing bowl.
it took me a good 25 or so minutes of constant mixing... and my arm is sore now (great workout for my arm, really)... but it turned out just fine!
and i used just normal store-bought carton of cream... "UHT pasteurized" works! =)
the hardest part is waiting for the cream to thicken to even just the "soft peak" stage... it took a good 18-20 minutes just for it took thicken up to soft peaks... but after that, the other stages come pretty quick...
so don't give up! it just takes a while! and it sure does help the process if you're watching tv while whisking!
the butter is yummy and fresh... it's just got a different feel to it compared to store-bought butter... i'll definitely be making it again in the future!
BTW I'd love to know exactly what is going on there. How does one emulsion (fat in water = milk) turn into another emulsion (water in fat = butter), just by beating it?
take one litre of milk (2% and above), bring to a boil and cool until lukewarm. Add a generous tsp of greek yogurt (live cultures). With a whisk, mix it well into the milk. Keep the milk covered in a warm place, like a cabinet or inside your oven, undisturbed. You will get fresh homemade yogurt in 7-8 hrs depending on the weather. While using it, remember to save the last few spoons to use to make your next batch of yogurt.
If you make this with whole milk, you will get a whole thick layer of creamy yogurt on the top. Scoop it out each time and collect in a bottle in the refrigerator. Once bottle is half full, you can add some warm water to it and manually shake the bottle for 10-15 minutes to get your own homemade butter.
Hope that helps the guests who've asked about making yogurt above!
You can go us all better and make Cornish-style clotted cream.
1 - Visit a local, preferably organic, farmers market and ask around to find out if anybody knows of a dairy selling raw milk.
2. - Do a google search for a local organic farmers organization that could help.
3. Check out the Weston Price website for plenty of info: http://www.realmilk.com/where.html
I've been buying raw whole milk - cream on top - and eggs directly for several months now. Thanks for the great website - I'll be making butter soon!
When you whip cream, you put everything into the freezer to help the fats solidify and give a nice solid whip. However, if you heat the bowl by running hot water in it first, the whipping cream seems to bypass that whole "whipped cream" stage. Needless to say, it was while making whipped cream that I found this out....but have done that many times since for butter making. It doesn't seem to harm the final product in any way.
I just attempted to make my first batch of cultured butter with organic low pasteurized cream. Everything was going along swimmingly. Cream thickened nicely overnight, beat up to soft then stiff peaks, separated a bit. But, I thought it didn't look like enough buttermilk came off, so I kept on mixing, apparently blending both back together. No matter how much I whipped, I couldn't get the butter to come out again.
Next time I'll quit at the first sight of buttermilk, and I already threw out the cream, but I'm really curious as to if there is anything to do at that stage to save the process?
Additionally, all of the cultured milk products in the US must be pasteurized prior to being cultured. So we kill of the naturally occuring bacteria before we add nice,new, FDA approved ones. This applies to organics (Horizon, Stonyfield Farm) too.
I have used it (solely for drinking because it's so expensive) as I could afford it over the past six years with no problems.
I just noticed yesterday that there was a pint of raw whipping grade CREAM for sale at Whole Foods, with the prohibitively expensive price tag of over $11. I didn't che