My wife is mad at me because I don't understand why she would want to make her own butter. That is not a euphemism.
She saw a recipe for it and thinks it would be a good idea.
Me: Why not just buy butter?
Her: Maybe it's cheaper.
Me: Butter isn't expensive enough to justify making your own.
Her: Maybe it tastes better.
Me: Store-bought butter tastes good enough.
Her: Why do I try to talk to you?
Me: Sorry, Laura Ingalls. I just don't get it.
Mr. krista was once offended for about 24 hours when I suggested we buy mayonnaise.
That said, butter is too much of a pain to make yourself. We buy fresh from a local raw milk purveyor, and it really does make a huge difference in taste, though.
Making butter is easy, stupid, significantly more expensive and insufficiently extra-delicious to justify the additional pain in the balls. However: If you have a Kitchen Aid Mixer you can make butter by putting some heavy cream in the bowl, then beating it mercilessly for about 6 or 8 minutes with with the whisk attachment. The cream will thicken up fairly quickly. After a few minutes of whipping, you will have a very thick whipped cream. A few more minutes later and the milk solids will coagulate and separate from the liquid--you will notice this because pale, watery buttermilk will suddenly fly from the whisk and all over your counter and kitchen walls. Good idea then to turn off the mixer. In your mixing bowl, there will be a lump of butter amid an inch or so of buttermilk. Then you get to remove the butter from the bowl and squeeze it under cool running water until all of the butter milk is gone. (Excess milk will cause even quicker spoilage--rancid butter is horrid.)Then wrap the thing in wax paper and plastic wrap and BLAM! You've got yourself some butter that tastes pretty much exactly like the butter you get in in a grocery store. The only difference is that the commercial butter comes pre-wrapped, requires no whisking or wall-cleaning or mixer-washing, has a significantly longer shelf-life (commercial equipment can remove the perfect amount of moisture--the fat:solid:liquid ratio is
always the same) and is way, way cheaper. (Two quarts of heavy cream will yield about a pound of butter. In most groceries, heavy cream costs about $4 per quart. Butter costs $4 p/lb.)
Caveat: the unpasteurized raw milk that we buy here in the summer (at $5 per quart!) makes frightfully good butter and, happily, the farmers that sell us the milk also sell us the butter. If they didn't make butter, I would probably make $12p/# butter and keep it in the freezer until the day I finally break down and eat the whole mess of it with a spoon.
Another caveat: Euro-style cultured butter is difficult to find around here (if not impossible) and totally delicious. If I knew the first thing about making it, I would totally do that.
