Homemade bread AND homemade butter!

Ilipilli recently posted about their favourite sourdough bread recipe. I had always thought sourdough was difficult to make, involving days or weeks (or more) of starter preparation, and subject to the whims of the microbial gods. This version uses a small amount of regular yeast, needs no (yes, no) kneading, and the taste is awesome. This is no tv chef hyperbole- the taste is amazing! Try it!

When planning my baking adventures, I got thinking about other homemade foods, and had a desire to make our own butter. I have to say from the outset that I'm not a big butter fan, having broken a twenty year old bread-needs-to-be-buttered habit over ten years ago. Believe me, after a few weeks off the butter wagon, you come to notice and appreciate butter (and dislike margerine!) a lot more. I still think butter tastes great on bread, but I don't have it regularly. Until recently, we didn't even keep butter-for spreading in the house, meaning butter-dependent guests had to dig into the cooking butter (which is no different, obviously, but just not so nicely presented!). Big Bro has, however, developed a taste for butter, so we've decided to offer it infrequently as a "sometimes food" (and certainly not automatically!) rather than have incomplete blocks of cooking butter.

So when I planned our bread baking, I thought we could make butter to go with it.

When I mentioned that we made butter, I was surprised by how many of my otherwise well-educated acquaintances didn't know how butter is made! Perhaps they never read Laura Ingals Wilder books with the churner on rockers, or saw the churning apparatuses at ye olde tourist houses? Butter is just made from cream that is whipped until it separates into the fat (butter) and the liquid (buttermilk). So you just mix cream past the whipped cream state. I remember I enjoyed making butter when I was a child- we did it by shaking a carton of cream until it eventually made a "slop slop" noise, indicating the butter and buttermilk had separated out. I didn't think Big Bro's energy and attention span were up to the manual version, so we brought in the big gun- the KitchenAid. For the record, I bought the cream at our local shop and couldn't get anything that didn't have gelatin ("thickened cream") which some websites say is a no-no, but it was fine: for the record (and anyone googling it!), you can make butter from thickened cream!

We put 300mL cream in the mixer

And whipped it.

And whipped it.

And whipped it.

And all of a sudden the butter separated from the buttermilk.

We strained the buttermilk off the butter and added a few pinches of salt to the butter. To make it properly you should wash the buttermilk off the butter with water (the buttermilk can go rancid) but as ours was just a demo-model, I didn't bother too much.

A few sips of buttermilk each, a smear of butter on our warm sourdough, and if we were feeling indulgent, a smear of quince jelly to top it off. And it was good.

Part of the AMB Blog Carnival.