Make Your Own Butter

I'm always on a mission to eat healthy and save money, so I can't believe I haven't started making butter at home sooner. 

You may be surprised to see that I said "healthy" and "butter" in the same sentence. If so, you should read the untold story of butter. Our bodies need saturated fats like butter. Butter is also a fantastic source of vitamins, minerals, and more. If you eat raw butter from grassfed cows, you maximize your benefits. Too bad raw butter is hard to come by, and expensive, right?

Wrong! Making raw butter yourself is easy. All you need is access to fresh raw milk, and a means for whipping the heck out of the cream. Here's what I did to make the freshest butter I've ever tasted:

The cream is getting thicker!

First, I skimmed the cream off the top of my raw milk. I poured about one cup of cream into my blender, and started the machine. For the first few minutes of blending, the cream did not appear to change much. After about five minutes, I noticed that it was getting thicker along the sides of the glass.

You can see on the spoon how the buttermilk separated.

After about ten minutes, the thicker parts seemed to slowly disappear. While the blender was running, all I could see was very runny cream. However, when I stopped the blender, the clumps of better was easy to see. It appeared runny at first because the buttermilk separated from the cream.

Next, I poured the contents of the blender through a strainer. There was a lot more buttermilk than I expected (maybe I'll make pancakes with it!). My butter still seemed a little too wet, though.

I decided to put the butter back in the blender for a little more beating. That separated out a little more buttermilk. By this time, the butter was very warm, soft, and whipped. I put it in a bowl and placed it in the fridge to cool and harden. Within an hour, it was stiff. 

Now I'm going to have to start searching for a mold to make fancy butters for special occasions...or maybe I'll just use my fruit snacks molds?