Making butter is easier than you'd think!

We have been playing around again with our dreamy cream from Bannister Downs.  Ever wonder why our cucumber sandwiches are so incredibly good?

Making butter is simple and easy these days. You can churn butter from cream in a blender, food processor, mixer, or even some bread machines. In the old days, it was whipped and beaten into submission by hand! To read more about it, check out David Leibovitz's recent blog post on making traditional Irish butter

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2010/09/how-to-make-irish-butter/

Buy really great cream and make your own.  Better yet, buy the really great cream when it is reduced in price or about to meet its best before date!

It is not economically sound to make your own butter everyday, as there are so many butters commercially available [even superb ones], but it is oh-so-incredibly satisfying!

Here's the scientific version of how butter ‘happens’…..

All you need is a machine or device that will agitate the cream so that the fat globules in the cream are destabilized. This causes the fat globules to start to clump. This clumping first enables tiny air bubbles to be trapped in the cream forming a relatively stable foam that we know of as whipped cream. When the agitation continues, the fat globules begin to clump so much that the air and fluid being help in place cannot be contained any longer. The foam seizes and the fat network begins to break down into large fat clusters that we call butter.

Are you down with all that?

Good! Now get to work….

Bring your cream to room temperature.  In an electric mixer start as if you are making whipped cream. It will go through the usual stage of starting to form firm peaks and then it becomes quite stiff. At this point you might like to reduce the speed of your whisk because when it goes it happens very fast.

All of a sudden the cream goes a bit yellow in colour and then little bits of butter appear and a thin liquid, the buttermilk, accumulates at the bottom. Just seconds later, the butter seems to clump and is separated from the buttermilk.

Drain the buttermilk off – keep it for pancakes or scones!

Squeeze out the excess liquid and press the butter into an airtight container and store in the fridge.  It will only keep a week or so, as there are no preservatives or additives, and the residual buttermilk will quickly turn it rancid [unless you wash your butter – but that’s a whole other story!]

In the kitchen, we generously smear this amazingness onto fluffy white bread and create sublime cucumber sandwiches for our high tea guests.

So, next time you daintily draw a cucumber sandwich towards your perfectly glossed lips, ask yourself if the butter is ‘house-churned’.  If not, do you want it to end up on the hips?