Butter
(posted 5/9/11)
As you may or may not know, I am a DIY sort of a gal. Outsourcing is not in my makeup. I think I must have been a pioneer in a former life. So anyway, I recently bought a share of a Jersey milk cow in order to get fresh raw milk in a more or less legal fashion. If you’ve ever had raw milk, you know it is worth the somewhat subversive effort to obtain it. Per the agreement, we get a gallon a week from Farmer Joy and in a normal week, this works out to be just what we consume.
A week or so ago, however, we started getting a backlog of milk when Henry came down with a cold and stopped drinking it for a while. What to do with all that extra milk? Aha, I thought to myself, I’ll make butter! After all, the directions on eHow.com say it is the easiest dairy product to make. And no fancy tools required. Just four simple steps. How hard can that be?
Step one really is easy. You let the milk sit in a glass container and settle until all the cream has floated to the top. Then you scoop off the cream into another container and set it on the countertop to get ‘cultured’, step two. Sure enough, after about 12 hours, it starts to develop a little sour smell, which is the sign to move on to step three. So far so good.
Step three is the ‘whipping’ stage, where you whip up the cream so violently that small globs of butter start to separate out. You can either do this in a blender, a stand mixer, or by shaking the cream in a quart jar. Since I didn’t have all that much cream to begin with – say half a pint -- I opted for the blender . . . it sounded the easiest. The easy eHow directions didn’t mention any timeframe here, and so it wasn’t until after quite some time had elapsed did I begin to wonder if I had done something wrong. After all that time no change had occurred. Not one bit. I even tried high speed. Aside from overheating the blender, the cream was exactly as it looked when I put it in there in the first place.
So I poured it in the stand mixer with the whip attachment, and cranked it up to the top of the speed dial. If the cream needed to be splat against the side of the bowl in order to separate into butter, then I was going to go for it at top speed. But after ten minutes of this, nothing. Not even the tiniest froth. Now I was in serious doubt about this endeavor. Either I was an idiot and missed some crucial easy step along the way, or I had been duped by Farmer Joy. Maybe she already skimmed off the cream before she gave me my weekly allotment and what I was trying to whip was lowfat milk!
In a rage now, I poured the alleged ‘cream’ into yet another bowl and began to beat it with the hand mixer. This hand mixer is turbo charged, and normally I hate it because it doesn’t have anything that resembles low speed. But for this purpose, ‘High Speed 5 Whip’ sounded exactly right. Unfortunately, ‘High Speed 5 Whip’ means a large quantity of what you are trying to whip is going to end up outside the bowl, splattered all over the countertop, which is why I hate the dang thing. I have a solution for this, which is to hold a towel over the bowl with your free hand. But the turbo-charged hand mixer does not like this arrangement, because it reduces the airflow into the manifold. The towel kept getting plastered to the air intake grill, as the motor whined in an even higher pitch. I was afraid glasses would shatter from the racket. Also, I couldn’t see whether I was making any progress down in the bowl, because the whole thing was covered up by the towel. After a while, I gave up and tossed the towel away. The heck with the mess, I wanted my butter!
Not one to give up easily, I forged ahead and didn’t stop that turbo-charged hand mixer until my glasses, my face, the front of my shirt and my forearms were covered in a thin coat of cream. And still no butter anywhere in sight. Finally, and with reluctance, I poured the remaining cream back in to the original quart jar and made one final effort to shake the cream by hand, the old fashioned way. I remember doing this in kindergarten at Valley Brook School with Miss Sullivan, who sat us all in a big circle and passed around the jar of fresh milk for each of us to shake. And because Miss Sullivan walked on water, as far as I was concerned, it didn’t surprise me one bit that by the time the jar went all the way around the circle of children some miracle had occurred and there was a big blob of butter floating in the jar, just waiting to be spread on our Saltines at snack time.
I decided nothing short of a miracle was going to turn my cream into butter this time; and just when I was about to give up entirely, it happened. I shook and shook and shook and suddenly, there is was: butter! All yellow and shiny and wholly separate from the buttermilk below. Not very much of it, I have to say. But still, not bad for a first attempt. At last, after dirtying every bowl and mixing apparatus in my kitchen, I made it to easy step four: pressing out the excess liquid and storing the soft, salted mound in a little container. We passed around that tiny container of butter at dinner last night and sparingly spread it on our bread. It was sublime, really. Unbelievably tasty. But still, next time I’ve got some extra milk, I think I’ll try making ice cream!
