The Making of Butter

So it has been a while hasn’t it? It’s not that we haven’t had anything to blog about for the last six months, we just got out of the habit. To bring people up to date : Noah has started school and is loving it. Ryan is working on building Angela’s house and thing are slowly moving forward. And I have been following my usual pursuits as well as finally making some butter!

I bought my butter churn online from a company in the USA that mainly supply the Amish. It’s a 10 litre electric churn called a Gem Dandy, and I love it.

The cream we are getting is very thick and has defeated my churn on the previous two attempts. This time around we added more milk to thin it up bit and it finally came good and made me some butter.

We started with around ten litres of cream and did half at a time adding milk by increments till we ended up adding around 2 litres. The first batch took a long time with much pleading and swearing. We must have finally said the right incantation because somehow it separated. We strained out the butter milk (and saved it to thin out the next batch) worked it, washed it, and salted it. Ryan had a stainless steel butter mould made up at a local steel fabricators for $60. It’s the same shape as a normal 250g stick of butter and it works like a dream.

I was very pleased with the butter from my churn, just like the real thing, only, of course, much better. I wrapped it in unbleached, chlorine-free baking paper and a little label that Ang and I couldn’t help but make up.

The whole thing is a joint effort with Ang and I couldn’t do it without her energy and logic, thanks sis!