Whether eaten as a spread on toast or used in cooking, butter is one of the most important ingredients in the kitchen. A guaranteed way to improve your butter experience is to make it yourself. It’s a bit more effort, but it’s totally worth it, and you can customize it to suit your preferences by adding garlic or parsley for example. Here’s a recipe for how you can make it.
Ingredients:
- 2 cups of double or heavy cream
- Salt (if making salted butter)
Instructions:
- Make sure your cream is at room temperature, as cold cream will slow the process down. Put your cream into the mixing bowl of an electric mixer. Begin mixing it at a slow or medium speed. After a while, it will start taking on the appearance of whipped cream.
- After a few minutes of further mixing, the cream will start to look thicker than whipped cream. At this stage, the fat molecules in the cream will separate from the liquid. You will start to see small clumps forming, which is the butterfat starting to separate from the buttermilk.
- Once your butter has formed, stop mixing. Wrap your butter in cheesecloth, and squeeze it to extract the buttermilk. You can use buttermilk for other recipes, so don’t throw it away.
- Rinse your butter under cold water to get rid of any remaining buttermilk. If you don’t remove buttermilk, the butter will go rancid more quickly. If you want salted butter, you can knead a generous pinch of salt into the butter at this point.
- Shape your butter into your preferred shape and place it in a jar with a lid on it to prevent it from going bad quickly. You can add basically any ingredient you like if you want to flavor your butter, but even if plain, there should be a notable increase in quality from your shop-bought stuff.
