Butter!

So I made butter yesterday. It's something that I had been wanting to try for some time, but was wanting to obtain some butter paddles first. And then I found them in an antique store so I snatched them up.

They're a bit stained and I doubt they're a matched set, but they did fine for a maiden voyage into dairying. I found two recipes for making butter that seemed detailed enough for me to attempt and ended up with a mash-up of the two (one was from Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking and the other from Jenny Linford's The Creamery Kitchen). Here's what I did:

Unsalted Butter

   1 quart cream

~ 2 cups ice water

1.  Soak butter paddles for 30 minutes in ice water while cream warms to room temperature.

2.  Pour cream into mixing bowl. Beat on medium until splashing stops, then on high until cream breaks down. (It turns a pale yellow.)

3. Drain in fine mesh sieve. You can save the buttermilk if you wish.

4. Place in a clean bowl and use potato masher to work out more liquid. Pour off liquid as it comes out.

5. Add 1/2 cup ice water, mash, and drain off the cloudy liquid. It is necessary to remove all the buttermilk as it spoils quickly and will turn your butter rancid.

6. Continue to add water, mash, then drain until liquid that comes out is nearly clear and all liquid is removed.

7.  Shape butter with butter paddles into desired shapes. (Mine ended up in cylinders because there's a bit of an art to shaping butter and I haven't mastered it.) Wrap with waxed paper and store in fridge.

Results: I clearly made butter. But it tasted a bit bland and now I know why salted butter exists. I'm looking forward to trying this again. Also one quart of cream makes one pound of butter, which is a lot for just 2 people (me and the Beta Taster).  I suspect next up will be shortbread because I think that calls for lots of butter...