Recipe: Homemade Butter

We have raw milk coming out our EARS right now!

We alternate the girls' pregnancies so that we will always be getting milk from at least one of them...but for the past few months we've been getting milk from both of them!

This was the last week of that, though...we need to let Jenny go dry because she's going to have a baby in a couple of months. And Bobbie is pregnant also, but we should be back to milking Jenny before we have to let Bobbie go dry.

But right now, RIGHT NOW, we've been getting 6-8 gallons of milk from them a week.

We love us some raw milk around here, but even we have trouble using all of that!

We "share" some with a favorite person of ours, we make homemade kefir with it...and lately we've made homemade ice cream and this past week we made....

Butter!

We have found that our raw milk is good for at least 2 weeks. (Even after that, it's not "bad", as in harmful, but the lactic acid would start tasting too strong to be pleasant.) But we had 6 gallons that had hit the 2 week mark and I wanted to do something with it (ooooh, how I dislike to waste anything!).

Start with cute little helpers...

...and milk that has separated.

The cream has risen to the top. (Doesn't "cream" sound so much nicer than "fat"?)

Skim off the cream...

We ended up with 8 cups of cream from those 6 gallons!

...and then we churn it up in a butter churn!

Just kidding.

Actually, what we do is throw it in our Vitamix blender, with a little bit of salt!

I find this process fascinating: After the first round of blending the cream is foamy and somewhat stiff...

...and then I blend and scrape down some more....

...and then it becomes soupy.

At this point it never fails that I start thinking "this batch just isn't going to work this time"...but then I blend and scrape down some more, and then all of a sudden...

...VOILA: the golden butter sets up in the middle and the whiter buttermilk lays in the bottom of the blender.

Then strain it...

and you have homemade butter!

Daniel likes to drink the buttermilk. {shiver} I don't care for that by-product, but this golden creamy stuff that we end up with is yummy!