I Made Butter!

Pure cream and commercially bought butter

I'd never thought I would bother to make my own butter. Now that I have tried, I don't think I will look back :) I was watching a Thermomix demo on youtube and realised I could make my own butter easily. As I searched for more videos, you can easily find a few that demonstrates how easily butter can be made. It all starts with cream - that only 1 ingredient (make it 2 ingredients if you include salt, which I forgot this time).

Place cream in your mixing bowl and turn on your electric whisk (or mixer or food processor). Be careful that the liquid might splash out of the bowl! This is the only time you can and should over whisk (if there is such a word) your cream . Just whisk and whisk and whisk.... until you watch it turn into whipped cream and later into clumps and then pale yellow and finally, yellow butter with some milky liquid at the bottom of the fluffy yellow solids. Strain the yellow solids from the milky liquid. DO NOT discard the liquid. That is buttermilk which you can use it for baking. All it took was 7+ minutes, which includes a couple of stops to wipe down the sides of the bowl and taking photos with my other hand.

I am impressed that the butter naturally turned yellow and not remained white, since the cream I started out with was milky white. For the record, I started with 300ml of liquid cream in a carton and it yield 184g of butter and just under 4oz (1/2 cup) of buttermilk.

Comparing the cost,
300ml pure cream - A$2.29
250g commercially sold homebrand unsalted butter - A$1.49
300ml commercially sold Paul brand buttermilk - ~A$2.50

I am not good with Math. But I reckon it will cost a little more to make my own butter, not unless I usually buy branded butter. If you usually spend A$4+ to buy a 250g block of branded butter, making your own will be cheaper and plus, you get some extra buttermilk on the side.

If you want to give this a go, I find it helpful to plan to bake something after you make the butter. I had planned to make some banana oat hotcakes. After I am done with the butter, I did not need to wash my mixing bowl and whisk. I used them to make my batter. Instead of using the full amount of milk that the recipe calls for, I used mostly the fresh buttermilk and topped up the rest of the required quantity with milk. However, since I had earlier took out some commercially bought butter to allow it to soften, I used that instead of my fresh butter. Right now, the fragrance of the banana hotcakes is filling the entire house. Excuse me while I go check it out ;)