Makin' butter

For numerous reasons that I won't get into in this blog, our family was on the search for *REAL* milk for quite a while. We joined a food co-op in the hopes of having access to fresh, raw milk, but the co-op was just starting out and didn't have enough people at that time to make the minimum order from the farm. We're still in the co-op, but just couldn't get our milk through there, so our search continued. Then I ran across a family who owned a single jersey cow and was setting up a small cow share program. I was interested in two shares and she happened to have two shares left. We went up to her small family farm to visit "our" cow. I wanted to see what kind of conditions she lives in and how the milk was handled. Elsie is a well taken care of cow with access to plenty of clean pasture. While we were there we also got to meet their barn cats and their chickens (which they ordered from the same place we're planning on ordering our chickens in the spring, so I also took the opportunity to ask her about that). Everything looked great! So now we travel about an hour away from our home once a week to pick up our "Elsie milk", as Catherine calls it. (She calls everything else "other milk". lol)

Several people have asked about the milk and what we do with it besides drink it, so we thought we'd blog about it a bit. When our co-op order comes in this month it will include the vegetable rennet and kefir starter we ordered. We've made yogurt and soft cheeses in the past, so now we'll get to try our hand at kefir and other cheeses. We've made some of the yummiest ice cream we've ever tasted. We'd like to make some sour cream and cultured buttermilk too, but we only have a couple of gallons a week, so we have to stretch our experiments out a bit.

One of our favorite things to do is make our own butter, which we do once a week.There is absolutely nothing like fresh, raw butter! And it is so simple to make. Someone always asks, and no, we don't own a butter churn. Quite honestly we don't need one. We are only using the cream from about 1/2 to 1 gallon of milk, but that's just about the right amount for our family. As you can see from the picture above, Elsie's milk has quite a bit of cream. That's a half gallon jar and the cream has separated from the milk. You can see the line between the bluish milk on the bottom and the yellowish cream on the top running right through the top of the "B". If we were going to drink it we'd just shake the jar, but for butter, we skim off most of that cream and put it in a separate half gallon jar. I use a large jar to make butter even though it will be less than half full because the butter seems to come faster if there's lots of extra room for it to move in the jar. We let the cream sit at room temperature until it starts to sour (about 12 hours). I usually take it out of the refrigerator at dinner time and make butter the next morning. Once the milk has soured slightly, we sit down and shake the jar. That's it. Just sit there and shake the jar. After doing it a few times I figured out that shaking the jar in a certain way brings the butter faster, but it's difficult to describe exactly how I shake it. Within a few minutes the cream will start to feel a bit "heavy" and you'll see tiny bits of butterfat starting to collect in the milk. Keep shaking! Quite suddenly it will look like this:

At this point we drain the liquid. This liquid is "old fashioned" buttermilk. (Not the same as the cultured buttermilk you find in a grocery store.) We save the buttermilk to use in pancakes, baked goods and other recipes, then we put the butter into a small bowl. We rinse the butter in cold water several times as we work all the liquid out of the butter. When we're done it looks something like this:

At this point we have to go through the ritual of *tasting* the butter. I don't know why, but every single time we make butter we all have to stick a finger in and taste it...and proclaim it the best butter ever, of course. lol Then we salt it and put it into a small glass bowl that we use just for our homemade butter. That's all there is to it! I'm sure spelling it all out makes it sound more time consuming than it actually is. It probably took more time to type this all up than it takes to actually make the butter.