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12/29/2006: "I Can't Believe It's Butter!"

Here in my hands is a butter ball! Yippie!



Now I have about three different posts in the works, but I really wanted to tell you how amazing it is to make butter. Really, get a cow and make yourself some butter. Click the link to find out how I did it.

Nate and I returned from our brief off-farm hiatus to find the dear Farm Fairy (our good friend Esther, more on her and her on farm adventure later) had left us about two gallons of milk. Nate and I were wondering what to do with it. We decided to leave it and see if we could get enough cream to make butter.

So, several days later, we skimmed off about a quart of cream. Yumm. Only it was starting to go bad. Undaunted, I decided to take a stab at making butter anyways. So I poured the quart of cream into the two quart butter churn we recently bought.


After ten minutes or so, it was still cream, just a little frothy. After twenty minutes it was still frothy cream, only it really started to smell. That little butter churn is the best mid wrist workout I've ever had, and after today's ditch digging extravaganza you'd think I'd had enough.


Well, actually, I had. I swore off the little butter churn after about 30 minutes of frothy cream and aching wrists. I plugged in my little soup puree machine and away I went. Within 5 minutes I had nice, fluffy, bright yellow butter forming.


I continued to whip, about four more minutes, then poured the contents of the churning bowl through a strainer. Buttermilk fell out into the bowl and the solid butter remained in the strainer. (Yes, that is a giant zuchinni on the countertop). I was so proud! I took the strainer over to the sink and rinsed the butter, gently squeezing out any excess milk. Wow! Only it really smelled bad. The taste wasn't great either. So I played with it a bit and made my very own butterball, then threw it into the compost. We aren't enjoying the butter just yet, but we are chilling this evening's milking in hopes of making butter tomorrow!