Unplugged #6: White

White, white, white. What to do with white when we're not really into colors just yet. I had the epiphany on Wednesday night while reading How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. Butter! So the result isn't white, but the cream starts out that way, and the buttermilk is pretty white in the end....

I haven't made butter since I was in Brownies (hah!), but I knew the basics from that project and my habit of squishing my whip cream (not a fan, sorry) into butter on my desert plate many-a-time at restaurants. Dave had never imagined making butter at home and he's on a from scratch kick, so we decided to give it a go. I stumbled across a great site that goes a little more in depth, though we didn't use all their advice. Not having a cow on our deck, we went to the grocery store and started with Whipping Cream. Some day I would love to try this again with reaaaal milk and reaaal cream. (Anyone got some they want to share?)

We decided to have a race: stand mixer vs. shaking a mini container (small enough Bella could get her hands around it). We set the cream on the counter for an hour to bring it to room temp.

I filled my shakey container a little over a third full, plopped a marble in there for extra agitation, and then poured the rest into my mixer with the paddle attachment I use for cookies.


At 7:35, we turned the mixer on and started shaking. As it's the smacking motion that makes butter, we tried to make sure to agitate the contents as much as possible. Bella wasn't really interested in the hands on part, but she did enjoy watching Daddy's new shaker toy.



I wasn't prepared for how quickly it worked! First, it turned to whipped cream.

Here you see the whip cream forming "soft peaks".

Then they got clumpy, and as soon as they got clumpy, they turned to butter FAST. We were done this stage by 7:45! One moment they were curdled cream, and two shakes later it was a lump of butter chilling in its butter milk.






The mixer and the shaker were neck and neck the entire time. The stuff we shook was a little too soft, so we learned from that and stopped the mixer when the butter was a little harder.

Dave's amazement at the magically appearing butter.

Then we turned out the butter into a sieve to collect the milk (scones tomorrow - if I don't drink it all tonight...) and used a spoon to squish out the excess milk, which I guess can cause the butter to spoil quickly.



We squeezed it out with a paper towel, and put it in a little bowl. Since we're used to plain butter we didn't add salt, but this is the point where you normally would. It was perfect and delicious with the bread Dave made (from scratch! see, i told you...) yesterday.


This was great fun and would definitely serve anyone's mixture of curiosity and energy. In fact, it would be a pretty spectacular project on conservation of mass- the liquid which turns to huge amounts of airy cream, and then condenses down into a solid with some remaining liquid. We didn't go that far, but it would have been interesting if Bella were a bit older to understand. Also, I would recommend using a screw top container (like a canning jar, the tupperware lid kept wiggling off) and don't forget to remove the marble because it doesn't taste good with jam!