By Catherine Willoughby
If you ever wanted to know how to make butter at home by shaking cream in a jar: here you go! When I wanted to learn how to do this, I was frustrated by the lack of details in the "how-tos" I encountered on the web. As a result, I made sure to get pictures of the process so that I could make my own tutorial: one that answered all of the questions that I'd had before I tried it myself. This really is an easy thing to do, and even small children like to help with the shaking part...at least for awhile!
Begin with fresh cream. You can buy whipping cream or heavy cream in most large food stores. Either one will do: I used regular whipping cream instead of heavy. Allow your cream to warm up to at least 60 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about 16 degrees Celsius. Room temperature is acceptable, but the butter forms fastest at 60 degrees F.
Your container should be clean plastic or glass with a tight-fitting lid, since you don't want it to leak during the churning (shaking) process. Try not to fill the container more than half full: you need some air space in there so that the cream can slosh around. If the container is too full, it will take much longer for the butter to form. Please note that the cream in this picture has been shaken for awhile, which is why it looks so thick.
You can also add a clean glass marble or two to the cream. These help to incorporate air into the cream as they rattle around, which speeds the churning process. Be careful not to shake them too hard if you use marbles in a glass container, because you can actually break your container that way.
Tighten down the lid and begin shaking. You don't have to shake particularly hard or fast, just slosh it steadily. I used a "figure-eight" motion: turning the container upside-down, the back again, over and over. The shaking part takes a long time, especially if the cream is fairly cold. (I did this with cream straight out of the refrigerator, and it took an hour for the butter to form.)
As you shake your container, you will wonder if anything is actually happening to the cream. Don't worry: it is. Cream has a high fat content, but the fat molecules are in suspension. All of that shaking eventually causes the fat to come out of suspension and clump together. At first, nothing seems to happen, but keep shaking: it gets better.
As you continue to shake the container, more and more air bubbles form in the cream.
Eventually, the cream becomes quite thick (though still smooth), and you know that you are getting close to the end.
Just before the butter starts to form a solid lump, the cream goes from having a thick, smooth texture to a thick, grainy one. The grains are tiny clots of butter. This is what it looks like through the walls of a clear container.
At this point, if you take the top off and look at the cream, you will see something like this. Keep shaking, and the little grains will stick to each other to form…
…Butter! At last! Here is the butter, surrounded by buttermilk.
Strain off the buttermilk and pick out the marbles if you used any. You can drink the buttermilk if you like: it has a slightly acid, but pleasant, taste. You can also save it to use in a recipe (bread made with buttermilk is very good).
However, there is still buttermilk within the lump of butter that needs to be rinsed out, or it will make the butter turn rancid within a day or two. If you don't want to rinse the butter, you can get it to keep longer by storing it in the refrigerator. It will have a more milky, almost chalky, taste if it is not rinsed.
Rinse your butter by placing it into a bowl with a small amount of cold water. Be sure it is cold water so that the butter stays solid and does not melt. Use a wooden spoon to press the buttermilk out. Also, make sure that you press the butter together to get any small lumps to form one big lump. That way, the butter will stay together when you drain off the water. Add some more cold water and repeat this step until no more buttermilk comes out when you press the butter, and the rinse water stays clear. I changed the water twelve times before it stayed clear, so keep at it.
I found that the butter slid around in the glass bowl that I used. A wooden bowl or tub would have been easier to use, since the butter would have stuck to the side and been easier to press with the spoon. Despite the difficulty, I had plenty of practice pressing the butter before it was thoroughly rinsed and so got the hang of it by the end.
I had found no information on how one is supposed to get the extra water out once the butter is rinsed. My method was to pour off as much water as I could, then put the butter into a clean, dry bowl. I then continued to press the butter with the wooden spoon until I had squeezed out any remaining pockets of water. As the water appeared, I soaked it up with a bit of clean paper towel. This process took about five minutes.
One pint of regular whipping cream made just about 1/2 cup of butter. That is the same as a quarter pound, or one stick of butter as sold in the United States. I added 1/8 teaspoon of salt and mixed it in thoroughly, but you may add more, less, or none at all according to your taste. I stored my butter in a covered dish in the refrigerator to ensure that it stayed fresh. My family enjoyed it on home-baked bread.