Good butter, these days. Am I right? It's so expensive, I decided to make my own. I thought I would take my cultured cream (creme fraiche) and turn it into butter (and have some buttermilk left over to make more creme fraiche, cool huh?).
Did I mention that (grassfed) butter is good for you? It's too bad that real fats like butter and lard have been ostracized by the nutrition big wigs, because it's nothing to be scared of. Fat doesn't make you fat! Sugar and processed foods are the culprits there! But that's a subject for another day.
Butter is full of fat-soluble vitamins like A, D, E and K (which dissolve in fat and are stored in fat throughout the body). Cholesterol found in butter is essential to our brain and nervous system development. Butter is rich in conjugated linoleic acid, a strong cancer-preventing fatty acid. The protective coating on your neurons, called myelin, is high in fat - One of the most common fatty acids in myelin is oleic acid, and you get plenty of oleic acid from butter! Whoever said margarine (including "organic" earth balance, yuck) is better for you than butter clearly didn't know that margarine is made from highly processed oils full of free-radicals, contains actual metal, and then has chemicals and bleach added to it to get rid of the rancid taste and aroma cause by the processing of the oil. Butter will "give you a heart attack" but that other stuff is fine? I think not.
Here goes!
1. Make a quart of creme fraiche. You can obviously make butter with uncultured cream, but since you're going to the trouble anyway, you might as well go the extra mile for all that healthy bacteria.
2. Once the cream has been cultured, place it in the bowl of a stand mixer and put it in the fridge for about an hour so it gets cold.
3. Beat with the paddle attachment until the fat separates from the water, and strain the "water" out (you've just made real buttermilk! Drink it, make biscuits, use it in your homemade ranch, or best of all, save it for your next round of creme fraiche).
4. Add 2 cups cold water to the fat and put it in the fridge for 10-15 minutes.
5. Take it out, strain off the water, and massage the butter with a wooden spoon (or your [clean] hand, that is way easier) until the butter is no longer letting off any water.
6. Add salt, if desired.
7. Place in plastic and roll into a log or other desired shape.
I ended up with just over 12 oz of butter and 1 1/2 cups of buttermilk. At $5.69 per quart of cream (plus the cost of the buttermilk for culturing), it meant my butter cost approximately $7.60 per #. Not exactly cost effective, but well worth the experience and the quality of the finished product, plus I got to control the amount and type of salt. I'll be on the lookout for less-expensive quality cream for next time.
