How to make butter at home from fresh cream, using mixer? It’s much easier than you would think. Step by step, artisan butter churning instruction without special equipment.
A butter recipe? What? You mean, getting a packet from the shops, opening it and spreading some on toast, that’s the recipe? Very funny.
Except it isn’t. It’s homemade butter and it’s the best butter in the world – at least the best I have ever put on my bread. Salted? Unsalted? Smoked? Truffled? The world’s your pat of butter.
You knew, didn’t you? An urban myth says that you can just pour some cream into a jar, shake the jar for a few seconds and you’ll get butter. Whenever you whip cream, there’s always the worry of overwhipping and turning it into butter. That’s how it works but, fortunately for your Chantilly and unfortunately for the milkmaid, it doesn’t happen so fast and furiously.
It takes about 5 minutes even in a standing mixer to beat the cream into submission – meaning, Really Firm Peaks. Then it all starts to look really awful as the cream curdles. A while longer, and it resembles scrambled eggs gone horribly wrong and that is when you realise you should have put the lid over the mixer bowl.
Butter is made by separating fat globules from the liquid, buttermilk – which by the way you dare not throw away as it’s wonderful for pancakes or making bread. And surely you will need some to spread your butter on? And also, how embarrassing to have homemade butter and keep buying Hovis sliced!
Back to butter – separated fat still contains residues of buttermilk in it and that will affect the shelf life: if not rid of, it will make the butter go sour. So the final phase in our churning process is washing butter, bizarre as it may sound.
The method below describes the proper, involved process but as you get the taste for homemade butter (and you will), you’ll need a shortcut. Instead of washing the butter in a bowl of iced water, you can continue in your mixer with the paddle, adding some iced water to it, beating at low speed, draining and replacing with fresh water three or four times. True, it won’t be quite THAT artisan and handmade but your hands will be spared the frost bite. For adding salt, leave the butter in the bowl for a while to make it more pliable again, gently mopping up moisture in the bowl with paper towel, then whiz it once or twice with the salt using the mixer paddle.
Done. And a warning: once you’ve tried this, it will be extremely difficult to go back to Lurpak.