How to make homemade butter

My Nanna grew up on a farm in a little village near to where we live now. One of her routine jobs was to churn the butter; to make a product that has been common fare since the middle ages. It’s just too simple to pick up a block from the supermarket these days, so until this week, I’d never tried. So here we are, a step by step guide. How to make homemade butter: 

Now that I have made butter from scratch, I can tell you that the difference between cheap, spreadable yellow stuff and real, home made butter is huge. It might take 15 minutes to get from cream to bar but things like this are about little joys I think. That moment when you finally see it come together is pretty exciting. I imagine kids would love to have a go at this – a summer holiday activity? Let’s take a look…

To make butter, you need two things: 300ml whipping cream and a churner.

I used a Kilner butter churner from Silver Mushroom, which comes as part of a butter churning kit (£32.49), or just on it’s own (£21.99). You can apparently use a normal jar and shake it like crazy, but it would take substantially longer. I’d go with the real deal to save your arms. So, in goes the cream and the churning starts:

After 5 minutes, the cream is frothy and thickened, almost doubled in volume.

By ten minutes, suddenly it feels hard to churn and the cream is yellow. Another minute from there and look what’s in the jar:

That my friends is butter and buttermilk. All that’s left to do is pour the buttermilk out (to keep for making paprika and buttermilk baked chicken) and rinse and form the butter. That’s easy enough to do. Just add ice cold water over the butter and massage it until all the buttermilk is out.  At this point, you can leave it as unsalted butter, or add a flavour like my wild garlic butter, but I chose to go salted. I LOVE using flaked sea salt for the crunchy texture and amazing little bursts of saltiness.

I formed mine without paddles, hence the rustic look, but if you get the full butter churning kit, it comes with ridged paddles and a glass butter dish.

All that was left to do at this point was cut in to my malthouse loaf from our local bakers and spread that beautiful homemade butter on it.

Was it worth it? I really LOVED seeing the process of butter making, step by step and I’d recommend giving it a go if you’re interested in how things are made or want to give your little ones a project for one day this summer. It doesn’t cost much at all to do, in fact I’ve priced it up for you using Tesco’s cheapest options:

£1.50 of whipping cream will give you 240g butter plus buttermilk. To buy the cheapest butter and buttermilk ready made it’s £1.88.

The Kilner butter churner is available from silvermushroom.com and was provided by them for this post.