Recipes & Tips Blog

Images of stalwart women circa Little House on the Prairie posed with tall wooden butter churners come to mind when I hear “making butter.” The modern swell of interest in slow food, buying local, and supporting small farms, seems to go hand-in-hand with a growing desire to preserve such homesteading skills. Skills like caning and preserving, charcuterie, gardening, and butter making have all but disappeared in the shadow of modern-day conveniences. Even daily home cooking could be a contender for the endangered skills list.

Fresh Homemade Butter

A group of people in Ireland deeply concerned that we’re the first generation of humans so completely reliant on grocery stores, mini-marts, restaurants and prepared foods, that we might likely starve to death if faced with growing our own food, are working to snap some self-reliance into people. Their mission? To get us to grow something; grow anything, as long as it’s edible even if it’s as simple as a few pots of herbs in a windowsill. Grow It Yourself Ireland provides education, resources and community for inspiration.

The rich and delicious tradition of butter making in Ireland is a skill also on the verge of extinction, but Grow It Yourself, with the help of modern technology in the form of a webcast, may have just hatched a new generation of artisan butter makers around the world. As soon as I saw the Facebook post about Butter Live!, my “fun project!”, “new hobby!”, “valuable skill!” brain-alarms sounded and I was off to the store to buy cream. I stood by in my kitchen with two pints of cream from a local-ish (Oregon) dairy and my laptop, eagerly awaiting my butter making lesson from half way around the world.

Ready for Butter Live! to begin

If you’ve ever over-whipped cream, you were dancing on the slippery slope of butter making. Getting to butter takes nothing more than whipping cream to the point the liquid separates from the fat. I’m a bit of an expert at over-whipping cream, so I knew I’d have a leg up on this one. By the way, mixing in a little un-whipped cream is the quick fix for slightly over-whipped cream.

Cream into butter

The webcast was hosted by Irish radio and TV presenter, Ella McSweeney, along with Alan Kingston of Glenilen Farm and Imen McDonald who writes the blog, I Married and Irish Farmer. As they demonstrate various simple and straight forward techniques for making butter, a group of school children they’d invited to participate successfully transform thick white cream into delectable blocks of golden yellow butter along with all of us remote learners scattered around the world. There is something poetic about using such high-technology to teach such a traditional and down-to-earth skill.

The most likely culprit of a butter making disaster is temperature. The cream needs to be cold, but not too cold. I didn’t know this initially and simply worked with cream that had been sitting out at room temperature for about thirty minutes and lucky for me it must have been right in the temperature sweet spot. The example Alan Kingston gives for deciding on the working temperature is if the room is 59˚F then the cream should be about 46˚F. It needs to be cold enough for the fat to remain solid so the grains separate rather than melt.

Buttermilk separation

Whip the cream on medium speed with an electric mixer. The cream will soon pass through the beautiful fluffy white whipped cream stage and begin to clump and most interestingly take on a yellow tinge. It’s important to watch for the point at which the buttermilk separates from the fat grains. As the butterfat takes on a more decidedly yellow hue and begins to appear grainy, the buttermilk will start to pool in the bottom of the mixing bowl. Stop mixing at various points and tilt the bowl to assess your progress. It should only take about 6-8 minutes to achieve separation. If you whip beyond this point of separation the buttermilk will actually work its way back into the fat grains, leaving you with a useless mass of grainy whipped butter.

Irish Brown Soda Bread

Pour off the buttermilk and save it for baking. Especially save it for making the Irish Brown Soda Bread from Rouxbe Online Cooking School. Really, you must. This bread will get its very own post. It’s so good I nearly gave up eating all other foods while it was in the house.

Rinsing butter with water

After the buttermilk separates from the fat grains and has been drained off, it’s time to wash the butter. Rinsing away all traces of the buttermilk is important to keep the butter from spoiling. Pour a pitcher full (about 6-8 cups) of clean cold water over the butter and with the mixer on low, let it mix for just a few seconds, and then pour it through a strainer to drain. Repeat the water rinse two more times or until the water being drained off appears clear.

Straining rinsed butter

Turn the butter out onto a work surface and knead, press, squeeze and squish to remove the water from the butter. Traditionally butter spades are used for this task, but a spatula, or your hands works just as well. Once it appears the water has been squeezed out, it’s time to add salt if desired.

Irish butter is known for being salted where as French butter never has added salt. Historically much of the butter produced in Ireland was exported and the salt acted as a preservative extending the shelf life during transit. Alan Kingston recommended starting with a ratio of 1% salt and adjusting from there. Ideally I would have used a local artisan salt, but given that this project hit me with very little notice, I reached for a favorite I had on hand, Murray River Flake Salt.

The ways in which food can be transformed through simple manipulations like whipping, heating, chilling, combining continues to fascinate and astonish me. I hope you will give this a try and experience the thrill of seeing pure white cream completely transform into a different ingredient with nothing more than a bit of whipping.

Watch the Butter Live! video archive to see butter making in action. Advance to the ten minute mark, which is when the broadcast actually begins. Also, occasionally there is a very short commercial interruption.

Darina O’Connell Allen’s book, Forgotten Skills of Cooking, might also be of interest. There was a nice New York Times article about her work to reclaim Ireland’s culinary heritage published last year.

Fresh Homemade Butter