I Can't Believe it's Butter!

As a kid, I wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Not that I wanted to be a girl, necessarily, but I was captivated by the idea of living in a log cabin in the Great North Woods.  On my way to the bus stop in the dead of winter, I fancied that I was crunching my way to the milking barn through the new-fallen snow, the blue-black sky pricked with an incomprehensible number of tiny white stars, the cold air turning to ice in my nostrils and the winter sun just beginning to exhale a faint pink dawn onto the eastern horizon.  So when my mate Clive sent me a recipe for making homemade butter, I was overcome with that same pioneering spirit and couldn't resist the temptation to try my hand at churning my own.

I've always been a huge fan of butter.  Conversely, I find the idea of butter substitutes - margarine, for example - abhorrent.  Clive sent me this link because he's been both shocked and repulsed by the quantity of butter I put on my toast at breakfast.  This is why I will very likely die an early but mercifully quick death.

The recipe and the process for making butter are both surprisingly simple - a quantity of crème fraiche whipped in the mixer, followed by a relatively straightforward rinse to remove the buttermilk.  The recipe suggests that three minutes or so should be sufficient to produce butter.  Three minutes being roughly the length of my children's attention span, along with the limited number of ingredients (one), suggested to me that this would be an interesting kitchen project for the children to be involved in.  They are forever crowding around me while I'm cooking, trying to help and causing me no end of irritation.  Here was the perfect opportunity to show them something fascinating - turning a sour liquid into a sweet solid - while indulging their desire to help.  When I told them about the idea, they were falling over themselves to get stuck in.

As it turns out, the estimate of three minutes was somewhat optimistic.  After about twelve minutes of watching the whip go round and round with little productive activity in the bowl, the children drift away to find something more interesting to look at, like lint.  Even my enthusiasm for homemade butter is flagging when the mixture, which had taken on a whipped cream consistency early on and pretty much stayed that way, began to thicken more.  I leaned in to get a closer look when, without warning, the contents separate and the thin buttermilk spatters out of the bowl.  By 'spatter', I mean that it hurled itself around the kitchen in a violent monsoon of watery, sour milk.  The liquid came out of the bowl so hard that it stung my face, like fine saltwater spray off the bow of a speedboat.

Next follows the rinsing process.  This involves mashing ice water into the butter to wash away the remaining buttermilk, which is sour and makes the butter taste a lot like lemon cream frosting.  Now, I happen to like lemon cream frosting, but I don't imagine it will taste very good on my steak, which is where I intend to put my homemade butter later this afternoon.  Mmm.  Butter on steak.  Eat your heart out, Homer Simpson.

The rinse must be performed five of six times to get rid of all the buttermilk, and, as you might expect, the butter becomes harder with each successive dip in the icy water.  By the time the water comes out clear indicating that the buttermilk is gone, my hand and forearm feel as if I've raked all the leaves in Central Park, but it's butter!  Actual, real, honest to goodness butter, just like Laura Ingalls Wilder would have made.  Well, except that I used a Kitchenaid instead of a butter churn and bought my crème fraiche at the Tesco gas station down the street, but other than that, it's absolutely the same thing.

The children are unimpressed.  That's the trouble with kids these days.  No pioneering spirit.