How to make butter from cream….

Have you ever tried making homemade butter from cream?  I hadn’t until recently but now that I have, I’m a huge fan!

I don’t know about you but I often come across yellow stickered cream in the supermarket reduced section at the end of the day but I tend to just leave it there because I’m unsure how well it freezes and I had no idea what else to do with it to use it up on the day I buy it.  I can’t be the only one because cartons of double cream are a regular in the reduced section in our supermarket and it’s often reduced massively – maybe because it’s something that’s often left on the shelf, even in the reduced section.

I found some yesterday afternoon reduced to 9p so I thought, rather than leaving it as I usually would, I’d take it home and find something to do with it.  As it happens, I googled whether double cream freezes and it does apparently but while I was searching for that information, Mr Frugal made a joke about making butter with it – something he vaguely remembers doing once when he was at school.

His memory was very vague (maybe as it was so long ago but don’t tell him I said that) so I turned to Google again and it turned out that it was a super simple process so I thought I’d give it a go….

How to make butter from cream

Now, Mr Frugal’s memories seem to recall making his butter in a jam jar but I don’t have the stamina or the time to do it that way so I literally poured my carton of double cream into a food blender and started mixing…

I started at the lowest speed and gradually worked my way up to top speed.  The cream goes through various different stages before it gets to the stage that we need it to be at!

First, we get a whipped cream kind of consistency…

Then a weird kind of scrambled egg looking texture…

And then, finally, the mixture starts to separate slightly and a liquid (known as buttermilk) starts to separate and the scrambled egg like texture turns into something that looks more like butter.

At this point, I strained the mix through a sieve and put the butter back into the blender so I could ‘clean’ the butter which is something that helps the butter last longer apparently.  Cleaning it involves adding a little cold milk to the blender and giving it another good beating…

I strained the mix again and repeated the milk stage once more before getting my hands in and squishing the mix into a ball.  There’s still plenty of buttermilk in the mix so you need to give it a good squishing – I put my little ball of butter into the sieve and pushed it about with the back of a wooden spoon to get as much of the buttermilk out as possible.

When it was done, my 9p 300ml carton of double cream had made 159g of butter which isn’t bad at all…

I spooned my butter into a little glass container with a lid on because it can last around a week in the fridge if you keep it in an airtight container.

It tastes amazing too!

I thought it would taste a bit odd for some reason but it really was delicious!  Next time I find reduced cream, I’ll be buying it and making homemade butter again!

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