gnoll_shoulder Due to Christmas the store in Denmark have had cream on sale. The reason for this is that we both use it in the Christmas sauce and for a special dessert almost exclusively eaten for Christmas. This desert is called Risalamande and you should try it!

Any this enabled my wife and I to purchase quite a lot of cream for cheap! Like roughly 5 DKK (~0.8 EUR) for half a litre. One of the reasons bought a lot of cream was that we have always wanted to try and make butter, and if there ever was a time that time was now. So we decided to use 2 litres of cream to do so.

First of all if you do not have the arm muscles of Hercules, then you will need a stand mixer. Even a electric whisk is simply to annoying to use, as it does take a minimum of 15 minutes to make butter and the time only increases with the volume of cream. Secondly it is good if your whisky and bowl is cold, it helps the fat of the cream solidify quicker and aiding the whipping process.

Also and this might seem a little bit random. But ensure that you have ice cubes, it will be relevant later. Cheese cloth will be an aide, but we did it without. However, next time we will buy some.

gnoll_shoulder Anyways! Now it is time to whip the cream! This will take a while depending on the volume of cream, but essentially what we are trying to do is to whip up whipping cream and then ruin it. If your are used to make awesome soft peak whipped cream, this will feel like a crime against cream. But you will simply have to deal with it and the end result is worth it. So don’t cry. Eh… also go at a medium speed on your mixer as otherwise you will have cream everywhere! I am really happy we had checked different recipes before starting this butter making thing. As the process continue to will reach a step where the cream seems to change colour. It will sort of start yellowing. This is when I recommend you to put on the splash screen of your mixer. Because slowly, okay maybe not so slowly, the butter will separate from the cream. You will get a tiny hint where you will start seeing liquid escape the whipped cream. AND THEN BAM! It will leave the butter there is no tomorrow. I highly recommend that about 1 millisecond before this happen you lower your mixer speed to low. Not saying I got sprayed a little even with the splash screen on, BUT! Next you will see the butter mass assemble within your stand mixers whip. Let it continue to beat for like 3-5 minutes.

Now we stop mixing and take the butter into a strainer and let it sit there over a bowl or something draining for 10-15 minutes. Do not discard the liquid, because technically that is butter milk and we can also use this! No flipping waste if we can avoid it!

gnoll_shoulder Prepare a bowl with cold water, this is where the ice cubes come in. Add the ice cubes to make the water really chilly. Then add the butter to the bowl and wash it. This removes any excess butter milk, the water will go very cloudy. We want very cold water as the butter otherwise would melt. This will take like 3-5 minutes maybe longer depending on how much butter you have. We had a lot so it took me 10 minutes. Oh right, our portion of cream yield 806 grams of butter.

After the butter is washed, you should again place it a place it in a strainer to let it drain. Again roughly 10 minutes. If you just want unsalted butter, this where you stop. But we wanted salted butter, so we continued. Salting butter is actually fairly trivial it is a percentage, just like any good baking recipe. But how much salt? That was actually quit interesting I thought. Because, I could get a straight, straight answer… I even tried chatGPT. But after a while I sort of landed on this 1.5-1.6% will give a french style butter. 1.4-1.5% will give a Scandinavian style butter. Now, we like both French and Scandinavian style butter so we decided to do an experiment. One batch with 1.5% salt and one with 1.6%. I will get into the result later. So like if we have 804 grams of butter then the salt for 1.6% saltning would be 804 * 0.016 = ~12.8 grams of salt.

When you add the salt, flatten the butter, add the salt on top and kneed it into the butter. This should be done quickly so the butter does not melt. You can put it in the fridge for a bit if it is a problem. If you look at the picture right above, you will see our salt looked like powdered salt instead of normal table salt. Well… This was because we where out of table salt and I decided to just pestle and mortar the living daylights out of our salt. This might have had a slight result on the salting of the butter, but I am not sure.

gnoll_shoulder Finally we shape the butter, into the shape we want. We like to have it blocks. So we shaped it into the four blocks you see in the picture to the right. We wrapped the butter in clean film, as that was what most recipes said was best. Some also called for parchment, but I have no idea what is best. But, for us the clean film helped a little in the shaping process.

Now you have made butter. How do you then store it? You can use it immediately and it will last for roughly a week in the fridge. This depends on how well you washed it and the amount of salt. Or chuck it in the freezer, where it will last for quite a while. We chucked three blocks in the freezer.

So what does it taste like? It taste like butter. You might think well of course it does, you dimwit. Well, yes. But I was surprised by how much like butter it actually tasted. Also one thing I found the consistency nicer than store bought butter. Like there was a higher level of creaminess to the butter. I hope that makes sense. We had it both as stand alone and on home made bread and in both cases it was delicious. Though I am curious to see if the flavour developers a little of the next 2-3 days. Now, what about the 1.5% versus 1.6% salting. Personally I do not think that there is such a big difference. But I think that the fact, that I pounded the salt to powder affect the saltiness. I think if we had just used normal table salt or rough sea salt, the end product would have been better. My wife, however, thought that both where a little to salty and maybe we should go with ~1-1.2% next time.

Finally, some notes. Most recipes called for cream with a fat content of minimum 38%. We used 36% and it worked like a charm. Additionally, I did find some recipes for cultured butter I might try that in the future. Finally, flavoured butter. I think home made butter lends itself really well to adding dried herbs and lemon peel. Which I will definitely try later.

I know this blog post is a little outside of what I normally write about. But I found it a really fun experience and I wanted to share it.

./Lars