What is the best way to make butter at home easily? Our guide outlines several easy recipes and methods to make butter at home yourself, either from cream or from milk.
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For many of us, butter is indispensable – whether on bread or in baking. But why buy in stores when you can easily make them yourself?
Butter is one of the essential foods because we cook and bake with it or smear it on bread. The idea of making them yourself is not far off. All you need is a little cream or milk.
While it was still necessary in grandmother’s time to set up a butter churn and turn the production of butter into an exhausting process, today it is easily possible with milk or cream, a little muscle strength, and a screw jar. It doesn’t even take a long time to make.
Preparing your own butter is particularly useful because you know exactly what is in it. For example, if you like to enjoy your butter with a little more salt, you can decide for yourself how much of it you add to the butter afterwards. The following recipes serve just as well as a basis for making garlic or herb butter, which is essential for any barbecue experience.
Make sweet cream butter at home
Make butter with cream
The easiest way to make butter at home is from cream. What you need:
• 200 ml cream (fresh from the fridge)
• Screw jar (capacity greater than 200 milliliters)
Step 1:
Pour the cream into the screw-top jar and close it tightly.
Step 2:
Then start shaking the jar with the cream evenly. The goal of this procedure is to separate the fat in the cream from the rest of the liquid. After a few minutes the cream will solidify and you will get the typical whipped cream. If you keep shaking, only smaller balls of fat will settle out at first. But the longer you shake, the larger the balls get and the more liquid can settle out. This is especially important to increase the shelf life of the butter. The liquid that is left at the end is buttermilk. It is drained and what remains are small balls of sweet cream and butter.
Step 3:
In the last step the butter is washed. To do this, put them in ice-cold water and knead them carefully. This process should be repeated several times with fresh water, as this will remove the last remnants of the buttermilk from the fat. Then the butter is ready and can be salted as desired, or with herbs and garlic.
With an amount of 200 milliliters of cream, about 69 grams of butter are produced in this way. Mathematically, a whole pound of butter is not really cheaper, but homemade butter is always a welcome option if the shops are closed but there is still a cup of cream in the fridge.
Of course, you can also make the butter with a mixer. But making it by hand saves electricity and also works very well, as you can see in the following video:
Making butter with milk
You can also make butter at home directly from milk. However, this method is somewhat more complicated and primarily requires certain properties of the milk used. She should …
- contain at least three percent fat
- not be homogenized
The latter is so important because during the homogenization the fat globules in the milk are broken up and can no longer settle on the surface. However, this is essential for the butter making process. Raw milk is best for making butter. These can usually be obtained directly from the farmer. However, you shouldn’t take too much time with processing, otherwise the milk will spoil. Health food stores offer an alternative to raw milk in the form of preferred milk.
If the milk meets the requirements, leave a glass of milk at room temperature overnight. The next morning you can skim off the cream that has settled on the surface overnight.
The butter is now also made by shaking it in the glass. However, very little cream settles on a glass of milk, so the amount of butter is even less. About 80 grams of cream settles on two liters of raw milk.
Make sour cream butter
The recipes described above always result in so-called sweet cream butter. Sour cream butter is made in a similar way, but before processing it is necessary to enrich it with lactic acid bacteria. This gives the butter a slightly sour taste.
In the household, natural yoghurt can be used for preparation, because it already contains the necessary lactic acid bacteria.
In total you need the following ingredients:
- 500 ml cream (at room temperature)
- 100 ml natural yogurt
For the preparation you first put the cream and the natural yoghurt in a bowl and stir both together. Now the bowl is covered with cling film and left for about 24 hours. After allowing it to rest in the refrigerator for two more hours, the mixture is whipped until the fat and buttermilk separate.
It is then necessary to pour off the buttermilk and wash the butter. Once it has taken on a compact form, it is ready.
Storage and shelf life
The finished butter should ideally be wrapped in parchment paper and stored in the refrigerator. The better it was washed in the last step, the longer it will last. Usually one speaks of a period of between one and three weeks. Of course, storage in the butter dish is also possible.
