Making Butter

Today we decided to take some heavy cream and turn it into butter. All we had to do was put cream in a container and shake it, so easy peasy lemon squeezy, right? CLB did it over the summer in a science class at the library, and it didn't seem so bad, and CLG is exploring farm animals, so why not make butter?

Well, let me tell you, making butter may sound easy, but it involves a lot of shaking! Not the kids' shaking the container, mind you. Know this in advance if you decide to do this with your kids! Those excited little people are going to give up pretty fast on the shaking, and you're going to be left with the butter. And a sore arm!

Really all it is is putting an amount of heavy cream into a container that you can seal and then putting in the time to shake the container. Non-stop! For about 15 minutes or so. Which, I know, doesn't sound long, but when the Crazy Little Kids gave up after a couple of minutes, those 15 minutes I was left with  shaking the cream seemed to take forever. Oh, and did I mention about 5 seconds into my shaking, I realized I hadn't put the lid on tightly. Cream all over me and the kids. Fun! Make sure your lid actually fits your container tightly!

After we shook for a bit, the cream turned into whipped cream. At this point, I added a bit of salt to the mix and started shaking....again! I kept at it but made the kids shake at times to give my arm a rest (they actually liked to jump with the container. To be honest, that seemed to work better than my shaking!). Eventually, we noticed that a liquid had reformed back in the container. We opened it up and there it was!

Butter! Sitting in it's very own buttermilk!

We were amazed!! To be honest, I didn't think it would work. I mean, knowing that it should work and then having it actually work are two different things. Next question, how did it taste!? So we drained the butter from the buttermilk:

Really high tech, huh!

And then plopped it onto wax paper:

This was still actually pretty wet. I ended up draining more buttermilk using a paper towel and putting the butter back onto fresh wax paper.

Then the big taste test...would it taste like butter!?!

It looks good, but how does it taste?

It does! Like fresh salted butter. It's fantastic! I can't believe we did it! We wrapped it up and put it in the fridge.

All wrapped up and ready to go!

The Crazy Kids and I have every intention of eating it with dinner tonight. It's lovely! And fun! Now, I just have to work out this cramp in my arm....