Homespun Necessities: Butter

I always imagined that making butter involved a contraption large, creaking, and wooden, and a serious arm workout. Churning butter sounds so serious, and like it requires bonnet-wearing. So, as official research (yes, let's call it that) for my newly conceived series on creating kitchen basics by hand, I googled "how to make butter." What I found, friends, blew my tiny little brain. Into tiny little pieces.

You take room-temperature heavy cream. You put it in a lidded mason jar. You shake it. You pour the liquid into a cup (save!) and knead what's left (butter!) under cold water until all the little droplets of liquid are gone.

BAM.

Butter.

Seriously. It takes about 6 minutes. And what I didn't mention is there's a bonus- a little cup of buttermilk, perfect for making pancakes that you're going to melt that homespun butter over. I started with about 1.5 cups of cream and ended up with a nice little 1/2-cup serving of butter, and just under 1 cup of buttermilk.

For more detail, head over to Veronica's blog. But, really, that's it. As long as I remember to buy cream when I shop, I don't think I'll buy butter again. It's that easy, that tasty, and that satisfying. And instead of telling my mister that I shook some cream in a jar while watching Breaking Bad with a hot chocolate in my other hand, I'll say when he asks why I'm rubbing my bicep with a falsified expression of pain, Oh, it's nothing. I just churned butter this afternoon.

Happy handcrafting, crafty people!

xxx,
j