When the Cow Gives You Cream, Make Butter

...when life gives you lemons, make lemonade!

Last month I was watching a homesteading summit and one of the speakers, Sally Fallon Morell, was talking about how great butter is. Since we have our own cow, we get a lot of cream and I make a lot of butter! I've been substituting it in recipes instead of oil for a while!

Here is my process for making the butter from the cream we receive. I usually pull the cream off of the milk and put it in a peanut butter jar in the fridge until I get enough to make a batch. I use my food processor to make the butter. I put in about half a quart of cream.

I turn it on and let it go. It's so loud and an annoying process, but we love the end result - beautiful, yellow butter! Ha!

Usually, it goes for about 10-15 minutes before the butter separates from the butter water that is left behind. We have also done this by hand by putting it in a jar and shaking it, and it takes about the same amount of time, but it's much less noisy! The butter sticks together when it is done.

I dump it out in a bowl, and the separation is obvious. Look at all that delicious, golden butter!

I make sure my hands are clean and then I start to squish it all to one side of the bowl. I want to make sure to get all the little pieces as I squeeze out the butter water.

The next part, I squeeze, squeeze, squeeze,

fold, fold, fold to get all of the butter water out of the butter.

This process of squeezing all of the buttermilk/water out of the butter takes about 5 minutes. If the butter is at the right temperature, none of it gets on my hands, and I end up with a good amount of butter water to put in the dogs' food bowls with their dinner.

I have started storing it in little containers in the freezer as I sell some of my butter during the week to friends. The color of the butter can change based on what the cow eats (the quality of the grass) and the time of year (rainy or dry season). Sometimes the butter is light yellow and sometimes it's bright yellow!