It's Like Buttah Baby!

  
   So the other night, me and Sweetie were watching an episode of 24 hour Restaurant Battle on the Food Channel. For those of you not familiar with the premise of the show, 2 teams of 2 are given 24 hours to create their dream restaurant (on a budget of course) and then are judged on food, decor, etc. The winner wins money towards opening up their very own restaurant. An interesting gimmick one of the teams used was when they brought your bread to the table, they gave you a little ceramic jar with cream in it and by shaking the jar, you churn your own butter! I know, too much work for some but think of it this way, you are burning some calories by shaking the jar and that means you can eat more bread and butter!

       So that led to a discussion between Sweetie and me about churning butter. I remember being in 1st grade and that was one of the cute little projects they had us do-that and make a Waldorf Salad (???WTF???) It must have taken my little 5 year old hands an hour to churn that butter but I did it and I remember being very proud!

       So where do you go when you want to learn how to do something? YouTube of course! YouTube is one of the greatest creations ever! Want to learn how to do a smokey eye? Want to watch a monkey sneeze? Want to learn how to build a deck? A spaceship? Watch puppies frolic or people fall down? Want to learn how to churn butter?! You get the picture.

       You all know how I feel about additives and preservatives in my food, so what better way to control that than by making it yourself? Anytime I can make something from scratch-I do. I have even started making my own tortillas! Most things are so much easier to make than people realize!

       So just like 2 pilgrims, we decided to churn our own butter! 2 pilgrims with a Kitchen-Aid stand up mixer!

What you will need:

Kitchen-Aid mixer with wire whisk and paddle attachments.

2 cups heavy cream ***MUST BE HEAVY CREAM***  Preferably organic-why make it from scratch if there is a bunch of additives in it, you may as well just buy it.

3 cups ice water ***MUST BE ICE WATER***

Step 1-Put 2 cups heavy cream in bowl of mixer and mix on highest speed with the wire whisk attachment. Whisk until cream starts to break, that means just past the whipped cream stage when you will see it start to breakdown. It will look a little more curdled than whipped and will start to be a bit yellow. This took us about 15 minutes.

Step 2-At this point stop the mixer and switch the wire whisk with the paddle attachment. The reason being is you are about to have butter and it will be impossible to get the butter out of the wire whisk. Keep beating the cream for another 40 seconds to a minute, the cream will turn to butter and stick to the paddle and there will be a bunch of liquid at the bottom of the bowl. This is the buttermilk, pour the buttermilk into a glass-now go make some biscuits!



       So now you have butter! There is one more step-cleaning the butter. If you are making this butter for a special occasion such as a dinner party or you will be using it within a day or 2, you can omit this step. If you are going to make it and then keep it in the fridge, then you will need to clean it so it stays longer.

Step 3-While still in the bowl of the mixer, add about 1 cup of ice water-don't get any ice cubes in the butter. Let mixer run for about 20 seconds. Stop and drain water out, repeat this 2 more times until the water is clear. What this is doing is cleaning out any remaining buttermilk so the butter will last longer. You may want to press the butter against the side of the bowl with a spoon after every "washing" to get all the buttermilk out of the butter.

       I know this post should have had a video to go with it but it took 2 tries -the first time we thought we had messed it up because it took longer than we expected. Next time I will make a video because I will be doing this again! With 2 cups of heavy cream we yielded 1 1/2 cups butter and 1 cup of buttermilk. We still have 2 cups of heavy cream left over to make mousse and whipped cream! We are already discussing how we are going to flavor our next batch. Maybe a touch of sea salt and roasted garlic? Yum! and Honeybuns is now fantasizing about living on a farm and raising pigs and chickens and churning barrels of butter! For now we will have to settle for whipping it up in my tiny kitchen!