Making butter
On Easter Sunday I made butter with my kids and my nieces and nephew. Doesn’t it look great?
It tasted really good and it was fun and incredibly simple to do. I haven’t made butter since I was in elementary school, but the memory of making it has always stayed with me. Now that I realize how easy it is to do, I think I’ll do it more often.
The only problem with the butter we made on Easter is that I could not get any really good, fresh cream where I was on Long Island. I went to a place called McCarrick’s Dairy to buy the cream and, although you’d think with a name like that they’d have some fresh, local cream for sale, all they sold was the ubiquitous Long Island brand, Oak Tree. Oak Tree stated on their milk carton that they get their milk from cows not treated with hormones or antibiotics. Their heavy cream carton did not make the same claim, but since it was my only choice anyway, I decided to believe this was a company-wide policy and so felt a little better about buying the cream.
Anyway, in the end I feel like our homemade butter tasted a little bit like a store-brand butter and I assume this was due to the cream we used. Next time I will make a better effort to get some good-quality cream. The process of making the butter was still the best part though and the kids were really into shaking the jar.
I used one pint of heavy cream and instead of a glass mason jar I used a clear plastic container with a good seal (I was afraid the little kids would drop and break the glass). But otherwise, here is the method we used:
http://crunchychickencooks.blogspot.com/2008/02/handmade-butter.html
We followed the method pretty much exactly and the resulting texture was perfect. Added a little bit of salt at the very end and had a delicious spread for our homemade rolls that the kids were super proud of creating.
