Homemade Butter
Posted Under: Friends,How To,Stories from Home,Zolie
My daughter Zolie and I thought it would be fun to make butter to go with Mom’s pancakes. My local homeless friend Hank found this great Daisy Churn #4 for me a few weeks back. With the leftover cream from the birthday pies we made last week and a copy of Joy of Cooking from 1964 we got to work. Right away we knew we were in for the long haul when we read “how much slower the process was in threatening or stormy weather”. We looked outside and saw it was still raining. We worked the handle on top of the table, then on the floor and finally we moved out to the living room to catch a movie while we finished. Finally we had what looked like butter. After removing it from the churn and washing with cold water we had to decide what kind of salt to add. We split it up and added French British Maldon sea salt to half and Korean parched salt to the other. The whole time we made it Zolie kept telling me to go slower dad. How she knew that I have no idea. I kept asking her where she lived last and who she was. Old souls make great butter even in the rain!
cranking hard on the table
It’s thicker now and she had to move it to the floor for better leverage.
Home made butter on Kyrsten’s buckwheat pancakes!
Update
The butter tastes great and the little bit of Buttermilk left in pockets of the butter makes it moist on toast.
Buttermilk will get used this Sat. for more Pancakes and fresh butter!
Here is how you can make at home
Reader Comments
What a fabulous story!
Oh my GOD that is the cutest little kiddo EVER. What a great story! She is lucky to have such wonderful, creative parents.
How did it taste?
Please tell me you kept the residual liquid for buttermilk. I haven’t had real buttermilk since I was little.
When I was a kid (this would have been in the 60’s) my Grandmother still churned her own butter. Instead of the glass churn you have, she had an old ceramic crock (similar to the one she made sauer kraut in) and an *electric* churning device (paddle?). About once a week she’d make butter from “clabbered milk” (milk she’d allowed to set out for a day or so), and the liquid left in the churn after the butter was made got a little salt added to it, and was put in the fridge for buttermilk. The stuff you buy in the stores today can’t hold a candle to real buttermilk.
Sometime my grandparents passed away, and their kids had gone through the stuff they’d left, I asked about the churn. I knew my grandmother still had it, as I had seen it stuck in the back of a closet in a disused bedroom not too long before she passed. I was told they’d sent it to the dump, since “no one would want that old piece of junk.”
Sheesh.
Would love to try some! Just to note that Maldon Salt is from Essex, near London, Britain