Making Homemade Butter

Call my crazy if you want to...really go ahead, I don't mind, I do LOVE being different! LOL...

...but I am SO EXCITED!!! *giggle* I finally got to make my first butter today! As a lot of you know, if you have actually read my posts lately, I've really been looking forward to making it instead of buying it all the time. For one thing it could save us some money. (well except for the fact that yes we had to buy the cow...so in the long run it will be a while before we actually start saving money but...) I've also been reading how much better fresh homemade butter made from milk from grass fed cows is for you, kinda like grass fed beef is lots better for you than the grain fed feed lot beef. So anyway today was the day....and the above photo shows some of the end product in my butter keeper. That beautiful homemade fresh butter!!


The first thing I had to do was get all the cream into my Daisy Style butter churn and let it set for a little while to warm up, as you can see here I had a 1/2 to 2/3 of a gallon of cream (some of which was the really heavy duty spreadable cream). It was really suppose to be room temperature but I don't think it was before I got to impatient and started churning it around noon. LOL I'm really going to have to come up with a plan once I start doing this more, so it's at the right temperature at the time I want to do it...so I've got to see when the best time of the day it is for me to add churning butter into my daily (or every 2 or 3 days) tasks. I guess that will come as I get more used to doing it.


Once I couldn't wait any longer I started churning and eventually noticed that it was not liquid anymore so stopped and got a photo of the whipped cream stage. Then kept churning and churning some more. It eventually got stiff turning the crank, but then all of a sudden it was back to a liquid...which is when I was expecting to start feeling chunks of butter hitting the paddle. I cranked some more and was really starting to get worried. (Mostly because of the fiasco with the goat cream not turning to butter after hours of cranking...and then finally giving up on making goat butter...for this year anyway. LOL) FINALLY it changed again, into a more solid state and then not long after that I could start feeling chunks of butter!


After I decided that it was all turned to butter I stopped and opened the churn again...and of course had to get a photo of what I saw, that wonderful fresh butter!


I strained out the buttermilk and put the butter in a bowl so I could rinse it and get as much of the buttermilk out of it as possible. The above photo shows it before it was rinsed.


Here it is after it was rinsed...doesn't look like quite as much as it did before, but still more than I thought we might get for that amount of cream. We got about 3 1/2 cups of butter (almost 1 3/4 of a pound) although I do have to wonder what it will be when we don't use that extra heavy duty cream. However even if it were just a pound of butter several times a week....we will eventually have butter coming out our ears! *giggle* I plan on freezing a bunch, for the times when we won't be getting milk because Mabel has to be dried up or is feeding a new calf.

All in all I'm a happy camper today, we had fresh homemade butter on some of my homemade rolls at supper. It was Yummy! :)

I know a lot of people still say that we shouldn't use butter, but to my way of thinking anything that God made (which butter basically is) has to be way better than something that Man made, which is what all the "fake butters" are out there. So give me butter any day over margarine!

Well I need to get off here and get a few more things done. Hopefully I can get back to scrapping a little next week...but we will see how next week goes. Hope I haven't bored you to much with my ramble about making butter. *giggle*

Have a great weekend!