We were recently treated to homemade butter at a friend's house and it was the best thing we'd tasted in ages (the raspberry muffin it rode in on may have helped, too). It never occurred to us to make butter, but apparently it's super easy and a great kitchen project to try with kids.
We found plenty of online resources for making butter and they all focus on one thing: shaking your groove thing. That's right, making butter involves lots of shaking which is really fun for kids. It can be tiring so the more kids you have on hand to share shaking duties the better. (If you're in a hurry, you can always use a food processor, but really now where's the fun in that?)
Okay, are you ready for the complex instructions?
That's the basic gist of it. There are some variations (adding a pinch of salt for one) and you can find tons of instructions by plugging in "make butter" or "homemade butter" into any web search engine. Or, if you're lazy, you can check out Oishii Eats or Instructables.
(Image via Oishii Eats.)
MORE Butter Making from The Kitchn:
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I did this at Thanksgiving with some of my students. They didn't know that real butter isn't yellow (they kept asking when it would turn yellow) and that butter comes from milk (cream). They ate their homemade butter on cornbread that we made in class in a toaster oven. My students were in the special education (mildly intellecually disabled) program and from very poor inner city homes. They REALLY enjoyed making their own foods in class (we also made homemade applesauce during our apple lesson). Food and cooking are such teachable moments!
view tgray99's profile
You might want to note that this works best with real cream, i.e. higher fat cream that is not ultra-pasturized.
Butter can be naturally yellow; in fact good butter from grass fed cows in season usually is. The color varies by diet and season.
Tgray99- This sounds like a great project with your class.
view JudiAU's profile
Get a frog. Put it in a jar of cream. Leave alone for an hour or two...
view Pencils's profile
Ooh, great post! I grew up on a dairy farm, and I'd totally forgotten that we did this for fun a few times. What's ironic is that I only liked margarine (the yellower the better) back then. :)
view TammyE's profile
I remember doing this way back in first grade when we talked about Thanksgiving. I haven't thought about it in ages! :)
view ChristinaTE's profile
What fun! Where do you get cream that isn't super-pasteurized?
I remember the first time I tasted "real milk." I was visiting my cousins on their farm, and they poured me a glass of fresh, unpasteurized milk, just what they drank every day. I involuntarily spit it out! It was nothing like the milk from the store that I knew.
Kathi D
ithinkwereallbozos.com
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Shaking is awesome for kids, but I use my stand mixer to do the hard work for me! Whip the cream and then keep going. When the butter starts to separate from the buttermilk, you'll want to have the splatter shield on your bowl.
If you want to keep your butter for longer than a couple of days, make sure you wash the butter with cold water until the water is mostly clear. This gets rid of the residual buttermilk (which spoils the butter faster).
view pam222's profile
this was always a standard project in kindegarten and 1st grade when I was a kid - at least where I grew up. My sister, cousin and I all did this project at least twice in school. The best was when our teacher added a tiny touch of salt (our crackers were unsalted).
view hs's profile
Heh, Kathi D, I had the same experience in reverse, the first time I tasted store-bought milk.
view TammyE's profile