Make your own butter at home!

If you'd asked me a few years ago if I would ever make my own butter, I would have laughed out loud as I wouldn't have had a clue where to start. In fact, up until yesterday I hadn't even contemplated making my own butter.

We had special meal at One Canada Square Restaurant a couple of days ago, (blogpost to follow hopefully if I get around to it). To start we were given some homemade breadsticks and butter that they had churned themselves. One was salted, the other was pistachio flavoured.

Pistachio flavoured butter is something I would definitely put in the 'sounds so wrong but it works!' category. Seven year old D was hugely jealous that mummy and daddy got to eat it and not him, so I decided to try to make some. With some help from The Brilliant Chef himself of course!

I had never tried to make butter before but I remember doing a science experiment a couple of years ago as part of our home-schooling at a local museum where we put cream in a jar and shook it until it thickened. It didn't quite turn to butter but certainly thickened up from being cream.

Putting cream in a jar and then shaking it lots makes butter! 

So I looked up 'how to make butter at home' and came across this article which I used as a rough basis to work from. I only used a small quantity of cream and we made one small batch using the shaking a jar method and the other using an electric mixer (using the whisk attachment).

D checks to see how much longer to whisk for

Amazingly it worked! Just when you think you'd done enough shaking and mixing, keep going and sure enough you get the buttermilk to separate out (we drank the buttermilk and it tasted great - just like nice milk).

In this jar you can see the buttermilk separating from the butter

You almost have to go against your gut instinct which tells you that mixing combines things and just keep going as it does separate in the end.

As I was only using a small quantity of cream, my whisk attachment couldn't quite reach the bottom of the mixing bowl so I actually scraped it out the mixer bowl and into a jar and shook it for the last stage to get the buttermilk out.

I bravely washed it in water and even squeezed to get as much buttermilk out as I could (apparently getting the buttermilk out helps prevent the butter going off too soon).

Washing the butter in water

Squeezing the butter to get out all the buttermilk

Finally I mixed in salt into one batch of my home-made butter and whizzed up some pistachios in a food grinder to get finely ground pistachios to mix into the other batch.

The pistachio butter didn't quite taste anywhere near as nice as the one we had at One Canada Square Restaurant but I was so pleased that we actually managed to make our own butter!

Such a fun activity to do with the kids (as they can get involved with shaking the jar) and great for them to learn where butter comes from and how it is made. 

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Linking up with Raisie Bay's Kids in the kitchen linky