I tried my hand again at making butter from raw milk. The trick is allowing sufficient time for the cream to rise. It’s not difficult and the butter was delicious. Here’s how I did it.
- Separate the cream from the milk. I poured the milk into this glass vessel, covered and refrigerated it for at least 24 hours. (Although you can see a well-defined creamline after a just few hours, the cream isn’t separated enough yet–you really do need to wait at least 24 hours.) There is just under a half gallon of milk in the picture.
- Carefully skim the cream from the milk into another container. I skimmed about a cup of cream from my milk. (The milk came from Stone Wall Dairy, Cornwall Bridge, CT.)
- Blend, whip, or beat the cream until the butter separates from the milk. I used a stick blender. You can also use a blender, food processor, or mixer. It took less than five minutes for the butter to separate as shown. The milk part is real buttermilk. It has a miniscule shelf-life, so drink it now or freeze it to use later.
- Drain the milk from the butter. I used a wire mesh strainer.
- Rinse the butter by collecting it into a ball and immersing it in cold water. Knead the butter until the water is cloudy. Drain the water and replace it with more cold water. Continue kneading the butter and replacing the cloudy water until the water remains clear while you knead the butter. The point of this step is to remove the embedded buttermilk, which will go rancid and adversely affect the taste of your butter.
- If you like, you can salt the butter to taste.
- Wrap and refrigerate or freeze the butter. My yield was a little ball of butter, less than two inches in diameter.
Note: At this point, there are no more pictures. The rest of the procedure is predominantly manual and I didn’t want to get the camera greasy.
