I take butter very seriously. It's the one kitchen staple I refuse to compromise on. But butter is expensive, and if you use it in cooking or baking, you can go through it fast.
I have a lifelong commitment to Kerrygold that I sustained even throughout my broke student years, and this affinity comes from my Irish grandparents. But when they were growing up, they made their own butter using fresh cream from the dairy, and it was a labor of love that involved a lot of armwork.
My arm muscles are probably not up to the task of churning, but thankfully, I have a stand mixer that can do all that for me. I recently made a large stick (more of a log) of butter using nothing but a carton of cream and my Ooni Halo Pro stand mixer. The process only took seven minutes, and it left me with outrageously tasty butter that made me feel like a pro chef, with literally none of the skill. Here's how.
A one-ingredient wonder
You only need one ingredient to make your butter from scratch, and it's heavy cream. I used the cheapest I could find from the grocery store, and my butter still came out great.
I started with 20fl oz. / 600ml of cream and added it to the base of my Halo Pro mixer. The mixer has an immense capacity, and could happily have tackled double or even triple the quantity, but it's definitely not good for me to have that much butter in the fridge.
Once I'd fitted my whisk attachment I simply lowered the tilt-head of my mixer and set its timer for 10 minutes, which is how long the recipe I found on Google told me it would take.
I then ramped up the speed slowly as my cream turned to soft peaks, to hard peaks, and then began to form a questionably lumpy texture that would usually tell me my buttercream has gone too far. But the goal is to power through this texture, which is when the fat will start to separate from the liquids of your cream.
Totally hands-free
At around the six-minute mark, things were pretty splashy. I was glad to have a splatter guard over my bowl, or I'd have been stood there like a chicken filet tenderizing in a wash of buttermilk.
Happy with the firmness of the butter and the volume of liquid pooling at the base of the bowl, I stopped mixing at the seven minute mark. If you're using a less powerful mixer (and almost every stand mixer is less powerful than the Ooni Halo Pro, which is designed to knead large volumes of bread dough) you might need to push on for longer.
Well... almost
I then had to separate my buttermilk (I'm saving this to make some Irish soda bread, like my forebears would have) and my butter solids, which then had to be rinsed under cold running water.
This was the most hands-on part of the process, and it helps to have some cheesecloth handy to really squeeze out all that excess water and any remnants of buttermilk. If you don't get rid of it all, it'll start to go bad much sooner.
Once clean and dry, I folded in some flaky salt and rolled my butter in some parchment paper. After a few minutes in the fridge, I was left with a rustic yet tasty homemade butter, and nobody to brag to.
To console myself, I smothered it far too liberally on some toast
But is it cost-effective?
Is it cost-effective to make your own butter? Let me put it a different way, it's not not cost-effective. I live in the U.K., where I paid around £3 / $4 for my cream, and was left with 300g / 10.5oz of butter.
Where I live, and my American colleagues tell me this applies to the U.S. market too, my butter cost about as much to make as it would've cost to buy in the store. But mine was super tasty, and comes with the added smugness of knowing I made it from scratch with every single slice of toast. Now that's priceless.
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