making butter and buttermilk the cheap and easy way.

Just after new year the supermarkets throw out masses of unsold food, just before these foods are binned they are sold off for literally pennies. Where I live there is two small supermarkets that have accessible bins suitable for urban foragers such as myself, all the large supermarkets have their skips in locked compounds and will prosecute skip delvers for theft and trespass. So I end up bulk buying things on date an hour or so before they are binned. Two days ago I bought six tubs of double cream (heavy cream) and made seven half pound sticks of butter and two litres of buttermilk. The whole cost of cream and kefir that is used to help split the cream was 1.90, a single stick of butter at the moment in the uk is £1.40 and buttermilk is 70p for 300ml. So I made £15 of butter and buttermilk for £1.90. It is not freegan, but it was an hour from being binned, so I saved stuff from landfill as well as saving me money.


Making butter from cream is not difficult and doesn't require any specialised equipment. The first stage is that the cream requires some fermenting. This helps the cream "come into" butter. I added milk kefir from the polish shop that was two days past its sell by date, solely because that is what I had in. Live yoghurt, cream fresh, probotic tablets, even home-made sauerkraut juice can be used. If you have none of these dont worry you can actually skip this stage, it simply means it will take longer to whip the cream into butter and buttermilk. I added the kefir to each pot left them on the counter over night. It needs to be between room temperature [70f or 20c] for the cream to start to ferment. 



The next day the cream should be starting to thicken. Worry if it hasn't much, it will still work it is way into butter. 
I added poured the cream into hand cranked food processor with the dough paddle fixture. I whipped the cream until the handcrank could take no more. In the past I have simply shook the carton, this is a lot of work and can lead to the lid coming off and creating a serious mess. 



The very thick cream was then transferred to bowl and I used a hand whisk. After a 10-20 seconds of using the handwhisk cream starts to split into butter and buttermilk. Keep whisking until it looks like scrambled egg. 



Then a couple more turns of the whisk and the butter is starts forming big lumps and whisk blades are jammed with butter. Now stop. 

You can see the buttermilk has separated in the bottom of the bowl


The lumps of butter now have to be sieved from the buttermilk. 


I then took lumps the butter in hand sized amounts, gave them one last squeeze to squeeze out just a bit more buttermilk. Each the lump was then rinsed under the cold tap while being kneaded between my hands. This is to rinse out as much buttermilk as you can. It is the buttermilk that makes butter go off, so you need to remove as much as you can.

You should now have two bowls one with balls of raw butter and one filled with buttermilk. 


The butter now needs to be patted and salted. Patting butter removes just the last bits of buttermilk, and shapes it into stick form. Salting acts as a preservative. In days where butter was made in the summer and stored in pantries until the winter the salt content was up 5% of the weight. This high salt butter was rinsed before use to make it palatable . Today salt in shop bought butter is about 2% of the weight, in Scandinavia its about 1% and ireland it is closer to 3%. I weighed out my butter into 500gm batches and added 10gms of salt to each batch. I then carried on patting the butter. Patting it simply slapping the butter gently down. The more you do the firmer your end butter will be. I have two butter pats, but you can use plates, roll a coffee mug over it, or the bottom of a very clean saucepan. Or just simply slap it with your hands. 


In the past producing long lasting butter was an art in itself. The process of completely removing every trace of buttermilk and adding enough salt was practised by every milkmaid and farmer. I know I haven't practised that skill enough. My homemade butter keeps for about 3 days on the counter top, a fortnight in the fridge, so I freeze my homemade butter. I have also frozen half the buttermilk. The other half has already made a loaf of irish soda bread and tonight will make scones. The empty pots now have soil and broad beans sprouting in them

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