"Is it easy to make butter from raw milk?"
That's a question I get asked a lot.
The answer is, "umm... sometimes."
Cream from any raw milk WILL turn into butter. But different times of year, it will have different qualities, require different handling, and the finished butter will have different textures.
If you were to buy a pint of heavy cream from the store, it will act the same every time because it comes from thousands of cows all eating the same rations year round, and it has undergone processing to make it standardized.
When you skim cream off of raw milk from a small herd of cows, it's a whole different animal, so to speak.
The good news is, you don't need special equipment to make butter like you do for cheese. If you have nothing more than a jar and lid, you can turn raw cream into butter.
In this blog I will tell you not only how to make butter, but also road bumps you might run into and how to get around them.
Basic Steps
1. Start by ladling the cream off the top of the milk.
The amount of cream will vary from jar to jar, but you might get around 1 cup of cream from a half gallon of milk, which will yield up to 4 oz of butter. It's worth skimming several jars to get enough cream to make a bigger batch, in my opinion.
2. Depending on the time of year, you want the cream to be at different temperatures when you churn it.
Summer cream makes higher quality butter and tends to churn more easily. In the summer, keep it cold. You can take it straight from the fridge, skim the cream, and churn it at 40F.
Winter cream is more finicky. Warm the cream on the counter to about 60F before churning. Winter butter is harder in texture, even at room temperature.
Spring and fall cream could be somewhere between those two extremes. The biggest factor is, are the cows eating fresh green grass, or dry hay? In northern Vermont, pasture tends to run out some time in September, and returns in mid May, with a few weeks of transition both ways. Ask your farmer what the girls are eating to determine if you should keep the cream cold or let it warm up.
3. Churn the cream.
My preferred equipment for this is a blender.
You can buy a hand cranked churn. While I love the idea of hand churning, the reality is, I don't have time for it.
Another option is to put the cream in a jar with a tight lid and just shake it vigorously until it breaks (meaning, the butter breaks out of the cream, not that you break the jar!). Just be aware that it will be at least 10 minutes, up to 30 minutes, of shaking. I don't recommend this with winter cream which can be a lot harder to break. Use the jar method for summer cream.
Whatever you churn the cream in, allow plenty of extra space. The cream may turn into whipped cream just before breaking, which will double its volume. Therefore, if you have a pint of cream, make sure that your churn is at least a quart in size.
Start churning, whether that's turning on the blender (on low to medium low), cranking the handle, or shaking the jar. With a blender, you need to avoid going too fast, while with the hand powered methods, go ahead and give it everything you've got.
It will take a minimum of 5 minutes of churning, under ideal conditions, but probably more. Summer cream, in a blender, usually comes in about 7 or 8 minutes.
If the cream gets big and fluffy like whipped cream, keep going, you are almost there! But it doesn't always turn to whipped cream first. Don't go past the point where the butter breaks because you were waiting for it to whip and it never did.
You know that it has broken when the texture changes and becomes granular. It's easy to notice when you are using one of the hand powered methods because you will feel it get bumpy and sloshy inside. But if you use a blender, it is easy to miss this step and let it keep going. If you leave broken cream churning in the blender, the butter will soon emulsify back into the cream in a way that cannot be recovered. So as soon as you see it getting chunky in there, probably small chunks, turn off the power and proceed to the next step.
4. Pour off the buttermilk.
Here's a little dairy education for you. The "buttermilk" you can buy at the store, in most cases, IS NOT BUTTERMILK. They take skim milk, culture it with a strain of friendly bacteria, and sell it as buttermilk. The only thing that it has in common with real buttermilk is that it is fat free (because buttermilk is the nonfat portion of cream), and if you are making cultured butter, they are both probiotic and acidic. That's it. It has nothing to do with cream or the butter making process. It should be against the law to call cultured skim milk buttermilk, but they do.
Pour the buttermilk into a jar and save it in the fridge for later. You may add a little salt. If it has a few butter globs floating on top, all the better. It doesn't keep long, so try to drink it by the end of the day. Or you can make buttermilk pancakes with it.
Scoop the butter into a bowl. Press the lumps together and again pour off the remaining buttermilk.
5. Wash the butter.
I did not wash the first butter I ever made. By the time it was 2 days old, in the fridge, it became covered with mold and I had to throw it away. Washing butter is not necessary if you are going to use it immediately, but if you want it to keep be sure to wash it thoroughly.
Cover your butter with cold water and begin stirring and kneading it with a spoon.
The coldness of the water will help it firm up into a workable consistency. There will still be lots of buttermilk clinging to the granules, so the water will get quite cloudy.
Pour this water off, add more cold water, and repeat. Do this as many times as it takes to get the water to run clear, or almost clear. I don't normally do more than 10 washings, even if it's still a tiny bit cloudy, and that seems to be fine.
6. Salt your butter.
Salting is not necessary, but I think it tastes better, and most importantly, salt will help it keep longer.
Stir in salt to taste. I recommend about 1 tsp salt per pound of butter.
After an hour, you will notice that the salt has drawn out moisture. Give it one last kneading with the spoon, pour off that water, and package the butter for storage.
You can buy beautiful wooden butter molds with designs cut into the surface for decoration, silicone molds that will yield a stick of butter like you would buy at the store, or you can simply plop a spoonful of butter in a covered dish or on a piece of plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge or freezer.
Enjoy your raw butter!
On second thought, you might want to pasteurize that cream...
Wait, what? Pasteurize the cream instead of making RAW butter??
Did you know that the traditional way to make butter in Denmark is to gently pasteurize the cream, and then culture it with flora danica prior to churning? It makes the most delicious butter. Most importantly, it prevents the butter from turning rancid after a few days.
If you are horrified by the thought of pasteurizing raw milk and cream, please read my previous blog posts about the pros and cons of cooking with raw milk, starting here. The important thing to know is that if you heat raw milk in your kitchen, you are not heating it nearly as high as they do in factories when they process it, and therefore you are not rendering it hard to digest.
Also, if you culture it afterward, those bacteria restore many of the good qualities of raw milk such as being probiotic, having enzymes to aid digestion, and they even turn lactose into lactic acid.
Raw butter is delicious. At first. But if you leave it for very long, even refrigerated, it tends to start tasting off. It hasn't become unsafe, but it tastes bad instead of good. It's not something that you would enjoy spread on a piece of warm bread. It's kind of rancid.
The enzymes that are active in raw cream begin working on the butterfat, snipping fatty acid chains into shorter pieces, which makes them taste different. This is a good thing when you make cheese. But it tends to not be so good in butter.
I have had this happen both with sweet cream (unfermented) butter, as well as cultured butter.
It's very disappointing to lose a batch of butter because the flavor turns rancid.
To avoid this, heat your cream to 195F, stirring to prevent scorching. Hold it at that temperature for 5 minutes, then cool it.
If you want to give it the richest flavor possible, consider culturing it with flora danica, available from cheese making suppliers, prior to churning. (You do not have to culture it, you can proceed with churning immediately.)
Pro Tip: Freeze the cream!
Freezing helps butter to break out of the cream faster. If you want to make it easier to churn, try freezing the cream before churning.
Culturing accomplishes the same thing, so there is no need to freeze it if you make cultured butter.
Buttermilk with bits of butter floating on top.
Comments