Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Making Butter

Samuel is reading Little House in the Big Woods and loving it. In one of the chapters, Laura details the butter churning chore. We made a simplified version:
  1. Fill a clean baby food jar half-way with heavy whipping cream.
  2. Shake, shake, shake for about 25 to 30 minutes. Obviously this step is better as a shared task. The cream goes to a whipped cream stage where you think shaking it isn't doing anything, and then all of a sudden the buttermilk starts to separate and the butter granules form. Just keep shaking.
  3. I then dumped the contents of the jar into a strainer over a glass. Buttermilk was considered a treat for Laura's family and Samuel really liked it, too.
  4. Here was my mistake...I used a spoon to try to get all the liquid out and some of the soft butter also went through the strainer. Next time, I'll be gentler.
  5. You can salt it, but we didn't. We spread it on saltine crackers so that's where our salt came from. Delicious.
  6. It only makes a couple tablespoons, but it was more than we wanted at the moment, so we put it in a small container covered in the fridge.
Honestly, I was a little intimidated by the idea of making butter. In fact, I bought the cream and waited until the best buy date before doing it. But Samuel kept pushing for it...he's such a crafty-minded boy. Too bad he got me for a mother :-)

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