Well the popcorn was all made (hot air poppers rock!) and I melted some butter. When I went to pour some on the popcorn, I noticed the butter didn't smell right. I thought it was just me though, so I put some on the popcorn anyways. We took a bite of the popcorn and we both looked at each other and said "eww!" The butter had an awful taste to it.
I went into the kitchen to double check the date on the butter. It didn't expire for another month. So apparently, the butter was rancid somehow. How this could have happened, I have no idea.
This made me look into making my own butter. Butter is expensive, and I'm tired of it going to waste. It seems like sticks of butter go to waste a lot more than butter (or spread) in a tub.
So I found out you only need one ingredient to make your own butter: Heavy Whipping Cream.
We went to BJ's last night and bought a quart of heavy whipping cream. I just emptied it in my Viking mixer and let it get to work. After a few minutes, the Heavy Whipping Cream turned really thick, like this:
This is only stage one. It goes through many stages. Keep whipping it, and it turns to, well, you probably guessed - whipped cream.
But you have to resist your urges to just stop at Whipped Cream and add it to your favorite desserts :) Keep whipping!
It starts to thicken a little more and starts to turn yellow. It's still way too soft though, so keep whipping!
It is starting to look more and more like butter! But you have to keep whipping until it starts to liquify a bit. The butter will separate from the cream, making you buttermilk. Keep whipping!
And here you can see how the butter is starting to "crumble" and you have the crumbly butter, and the liquid buttermilk. Now you are ready to start squeezing out the buttermilk from the butter! You can use a cheesecloth to lay out the butter and squeeze out all the buttermilk that you can. (You can save the buttermilk if you'd like to use it for something else). I didn't have any cheesecloth, so I just used a fine strainer to squeeze out as much buttermilk as I could. The more buttermilk you can squeeze from it, the longer your butter will last.
The best way to get the buttermilk out of your butter is by "rinsing" it with ice water. Pour ice water in with your butter, squeeze the butter, and pour out the milky white liquid. Keep repeating this until your water is clear. Then you know you have all of your buttermilk out of your butter.
When you get as much buttermilk squeezed of the butter that you can - you have two options. Put it back in the blender and gently blend in some salt, if you like salted butter. Otherwise, you are ready to put it in your container and start using it! I do like salted butter, so I put in a little salt, and then put it in my glass jar container.
It came out so smooth, creamy and delicious!! I just may never buy regular butter in the stores again. Well, unless I have a REALLY good coupon, that is :)
This process should take less than 10 minutes to make if your Heavy Cream is room temperature when you start. The colder it is, the longer it will take to break down. But since the mixer did all the work, I was able to do other things while it was making it's magic. I weighed the butter, and one quart of heavy whipping creamed gave me 14 oz of butter. (Almost one pound!) This will last us for quite a while!
If you try this, let me know how it turned out for you!
