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Home made Butter

Butter is one of live's luxuries and one of the most comforting foodstuffs available.

What can be nicer than hot buttered toast and crumpets with some nice creamy butter melting unctiously into the chosen bakery product.

Only ONE thing!! When the butter is home made.

Amazingly, in excess of 90% of people do not know how to make butter, yet it is one of the simplest things in the world to process and to make exactly to your taste.

So what do I need to make butter?

Double Cream + Salt + Icing Sugar to taste. That is absolutely it!

A food mixer will also make the exercise much less energetic, but not absolutely necessary.

How do I make butter?

In simple terms, you just need to keep agitating the cream until such times as the fats come together, separating from the butter milk.

You can do this by simply pouring your chilled cream into a food mixer and turning on to whip at the slowest speed possible. You will see the following stages:

1. Whipped cream - everyone recognises this, but keep going and you will see

2. Granulated Cream - not a common sight when you are whipping cream, but after reaching the sofy whipped peaks of your cream, you will reach a texture that is very similar to cottage cheese with very granular crumbly cream. That is the final stage before

3. Butter : albeit with some incorporated butter milk.

How do I finish the butter?

Ay this stage, the butter will undoubtedly incorporate some dribbles of buttermilk. If you wish your butter to have good keeping qualities, then you must eliminate as much buttermilk as possible.

Buttermilk can be eliminated by 'kneading' the butter to squeeze the droplets out and then pouring them away. To accelerate the process you can also incorporate iced water to the bowl and knead that through the butter, allowing the washed liquor to run away with the buttermilk. You may do this as many times as you consider necessary, by reviewing how clear that water runs.

Finally, season the butter to taste ... do you prefer a sweet butter or a salted butter ... add icing sugar or salt (Foodwithpassion recommends no more than 2% by weight) to taste, kneading it well in.

Caution: Even table salt at its finest can still be be too coarse and can be felt ... grind tour seasoning as much as you can and distribute throughly.

The very last stage is packaging. You can pat the butter with paddles to shape and potentially squeeze the very last remnants of moisture from the butter or to shape (into a clingfilm sausage for example).

Your home made butter will last up to 3 months in the freezer .... but will be lucky to last a day in the fridge!!