How To Make Butter (and Buttermilk)

I've done this twice. First time, we got about 2 tablespoons of butter out of 2 cups of cream. I guess we just weren't very good at shaking.

Second time was really a joke. We were at a ski resort with our school (I was 13). I had hurt my knee tumbling down the hill and couldn't ski. My friend didn't want to ski because everything was muddy cause it was march so we had to sit in the cafeteria for 3 hours.
We decided to make butter with a water bottle that we chugged and HUNDREDS of those little cream bottles you can get at the counter. Usually used for coffee. We each took about 5 at a time and went one at a time to make sure no one saw us.
We shook it for 3 hours straight and got so much butter. Needless to say, the guys at the cafeteria didn't know where their cream packets were going.

One thing. If you don't wash out the butter, it will get mouldy quickly. Since butter is fat, water doesn't really do that much to it. You run the butter under the tap, while smashing the butter against the side. This gets any residual buttermilk out. You need to keep it under running water until the water coming off the butter is clear(no more buttermilk in butter)

Do you need to shake, or can you just mix?

I am going to be teaching a lesson on The Great Depression and implementing this activity. I am so excited!!!!!

This was very cool. I just happened to find some heavy creme in the fridge and tried it out. I just shook it until the butter made a ball inside the mason jar I was using. Poured off the buttermilk and added a little salt to the butter. How amazingly simple yet cool.
I larger amount could be a slightly easy workout, perhaps to burn off the calories of enjoying the outcome. :)

We made butter this week using cream from the Snowville Creamery (Ohio). http://www.snowvillecreamery.com/ . For those of you in Northeast Ohio it is available at Whole Foods in University Heights. This is a pasteurized but unhomogenized product that does not contain any stabilizers or thickeners. The fat content also seems very high. It makes great butter that is YELLOW YELLOW YELLOW! It is about $7.50/ per half gallon, a real bargain for the quality.

We shook it down in a Mason jar.

My wife and I just found a local dairy that sells raw milk cheap! With today's milk costing close to $4/gal, we were excited to get our first gallon of really fresh cows milk this week for nearly half that amount. It is going to end up saving $$$. You might try checking in your area for the same thing. The milk is not homogenized, so the cream will separate overnight in the fridge. Ladle it off and make butter. Be warned that raw milk does not keep as long as store-bought. It is not pasteurized. But if you go through a gallon in short time like my family it shouldn't be a problem.

Pregnant women and children shouldn't drink unpaturized milk. Please be careful.

I did this today, but I let the cream set for about 16-ish hours before churning it to let it come up to temperature and slightly ferment (a little). I didn't have a jar large enough, but I had an empty apple juice bottle, so I cleaned it up good, poured the cream in there and my son and I took turns shaking it... it only took about 5 minutes to separate. Not sure if it was the letting it sit that helped speed it up or not. Anyways.. then I just poured off the buttermilk, added ice water, shook, and emptied several times until the water was clear. Then I put it in some cheesecloth to drain the water out. Finished draining water by working it around with my hands in a bowl to get as much water out as possible. Then, I put it into a small pyrex dish, covered with wax paper, and put in the fridge to set. The container I used was approximately twice the width of a stick of butter, so I figured I could just cut it in half after it set. Anyways... this method worked very well. I am interested in other ideas for extracting more of the water, though. I have heard you can melt it to evaporate the water and then let it re-set, but it seems like that would change it somehow. Does anyone have any experience with this?

This was great! I added a 1/4 cup Homignized milk and 1 medium grated carrot (to add color) heated to warm on the stove top then strained the carrots out and placed the milk in the kitchen aid with the whipping cream and before I had the dishes clean, there was butter. The carrot gave the butter a nice soft yellow color. I placed the butter in a seive and let it drain.. I then squeezed out any remaining buttermilk, placed the butter in a small disposable loaf pan and then in the fridge. Butter keeps in the freezer so I will try that next.

I use my kitchen aide. Use the whipping attachment, it makes less of a mess. I start it before dinner and by dinnertime it is ready, all balled up and ready to remove from the 'buttermilk' that is left. I have a 1887 whitehouse cookbook, it talks about using the leftover 'buttermilk' as a diruretic (sp) and for constipation! Even they had trouble with water bloat and bowel discomforts.

This is great,your instructions. You can also make butter from raw milk. No hormones or preservatives. There are some great sites that give the names of grade a raw milk dairys in most states.
I have only one correction. The liquid left after making butter is NOT buttermilk it is skim milk. Buttermilk is cultured. For info on buttermilk or general milk/butter/cheese/yogurt-yes you can make your own yogurt go to this site: http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Cheese/Cheese_course/Cheese_course.htm
great pictures.

Sorry, no. Skim milk is what you get when you remove the cream from whole fresh milk. What is left after making butter is indeed buttermilk. Cultured buttermilk is different, as the website you mentioned clearly states: http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Cheese/BUTTERMILK.HTM

I am interested how to make butter from raw milk. Can you please email me or reply here how to do it step by step?

Thanks a lot for your help.

This is not entirely correct. "Buttermilk" actually refers to two different substances. "Traditional buttermilk" (the original definition) and "Cultured buttermilk". "Cultured buttermilk" is cultured:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttermilk
http://biology.clc.uc.edu/Fankhauser/Cheese/BUTTERMILK.HTM#old_fashioned_buttermilk

More information on making butter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churning_%28butter%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/1978-03-01/How-to-Make-Fresh-Butter-without-a-separator-without-a-churn-and-without.aspx
http://webexhibits.org/butter/making.html

I've glanced quickly at a dozen other pages from a google search; they all refer to the liquid remnant as "buttermilk", whether the process involved souring the milk/cream first, or not.

I don't know if anyone said this but when I was in school we made butter doing the same idea but with a twist and it is easier. We use plastic jars and a big marble. The marble is there to let you know that when you don't here it anymore is that the butter is just about ready you might have to shake it a little bit longer if there is still some liquid in there. This idea is best for children because they like shaking things that make noise. Just make sure that you soak your marble in some bleach water and then wash it off real good so you would know it is clean. If you have high blood pressure leave the salt out it might not taste that good but it will help not raise your blood pressure like the butter with salt. To change the color just add yellow food coloring or any color that you want to make it. ENJOY I will do this this month coming up and it will save you money if you doing it yourself and you will know what is in it.

making sure to squeeze out all the buttermilk will help it from going rancid. also adding a little salt can help preserve it longer if you wanted to freeze it.

I haven't tried it, but from what I've read, an electric mixer can make this easier.

Thanks for this instructable--the pictures help vs. other instructions I've seen.

This is true, but it doesn't work very well in the blender if you start it as cream.

This is a very good Instructable. I had to resort to the shaking-a-jar method when making butter today; solely because I tried to make it in a food processor and the cream got to thick to keep blending. Then I tried the blender and got nothing still. I then just put spoonfuls of the thick cream into a jar that I used to use for soccer practice and shook it. Great job!

My mother and I have been making butter for years from the cream you get off of fresh cows milk. I suppose that whipping cream works as well. Don't know, never tried it. Anyway, we have always used the blender. Major time saver.

I was making whip cream with my electric mixer one afternoon & over-whipped it. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I was actually making butter! This was much easier than churning or shaking a jar! :-)

BTEQUINE,

Awesome Link! Thanks.

And thanks for the time trippedbreaker put in, nice to have all those direct links. As you would find at realmilk.com, the laws and prices vary like crazy state to state. I am in Arizona and unfortunately our freedom of choice has been taken to the point I have to pay $9 a gallon not including cream. I have a special source in the works and would like to see more of this kind of thing on Instructables. A local group is going to make Kefir, maybe I can bring a camera and post that, but I am not sure if I can.

I found out that putting the jar on my rock tumbler seemed to work.But it also seemed to take longer.

I was raised on a farm and we had a Daisy churn. My wife is from the Ozarks, they didn't have a churn but there were a lot of children. They churned butter as a game. Fill a quart jar with cream and the children would roll the jar back and forth to each other on the floor. Before long they had butter.

did you rinse the butter in ice water a few times to get the buttermilk off of it? if you don't it will "sour" in a few days.

I made this a while back, just put the cream in a mason jar and shook the hell out of it. For some reason though, the butter developed a taste similar to turpentine, after only a few days in the fridge. My roommate may have tried to poison me, but I never did get to the bottom of it.

Thank you so much for posting this instructable! I made butter and it was great! XD

OMG! I made this and my family loves it! My 8 year old has devoured the butter milk. Which I had not ever had and I also loved. I now know why people used churns though! This is awesome I just wish I knew where to find cheaper whipping cream.

Thanks for the fun and tasty-ness!

yum

I keep thinking paint can shaker :}

i remember me doing this one day in 3rd grade way back, the teacher made bread, and we made the butter by taking many baby food jars and putting cream inside of it it was so much effort for butter :-P

I made this in my classroom with my kids and they LOVED it. I added a little salt for taste and also to speed up the process if you put a marble in the container it helps it to thicken quicker. I want to do it for Thanksgiving when I have kids it's really tasty!

Ok so you use whipping cream? Doesnt this just make whipped cream or is it the shaking that creates butter instead of wisking in air?

Whipped cream is basically the middle step between cream and butter. If you stop shaking early, you get whipped cream.
(or if you're making whipped cream, and keep mixing too long, you get butter)

That's not spaghetti, that's linguine. Sheesh. I remember making butter in kindergarten. Everyone got a little jar of whipping cream, and we chased each other around the room while shaking our jars with all of our end-of-the-day-on-Friday kindergartener energy. The end result was great, even on the repulsive white bread that we were given.

That last picture looks really good. Come cook me supper tonight. Or lunch. Or even breakfast, I don't care.

You can also put the cream into a food processor and spin it on high for a few minutes. Much less arm work :)