homemade butter

The coming of butter is an everyday miracle, an occasion for delighted wonder at what the Irish poet Seamus Heaney called "coagulated sunlight" "heaped up like gilded gravel in the bowl." -Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

oh my god. you must make your own butter. it is the easiest thing in the world and it is DAMN tasty. i just ate a shitload of it with water crackers and let me tell you, butter and crackers has never tasted so good.

i have been dreaming about making my own butter ever since i read this article in the NY times magazine last summer. i love butter and i could not believe it was so easy to make. i cut out the article and recipe and stuck it to my fridge. it has been there ever since.

recently i was going through some old saveur magazines and came across the march 2008 issue, which is dedicated to butter. ok, i thought, it's time to try this. i'm kind of a food science nerd anyway so the whole magical transformation of heavy cream into butter was fascinating to me.

i used saveur's recipe which i will copy below. i followed it exactly and did not mess around trying to change things the way i usually do because i was scared that one tiny misstep could ruin my butter. the recipe turned out to be perfect and i would not change it.

you may be tempted as i was to add something to the butter (maybe garlic, or cinnamon sugar, or basil... the possibilities are endless). what i have to say is resist the temptation. your butter will be amazing as it is and you don't want to hide the flavor behind other distractions. if you want to make flavored butter at home, just soften a stick or two, mash in whatever you want, reshape, and throw it in the fridge. it doesn't matter if you use cheap grocery store butter for that because the flavors you add will be what you notice when you eat it. don't waste your time making homemade butter for that.

here is the saveur recipe (which i got here):

Homemade Butter
by Wes Martin

We found that ripening the cream a bit first—in essence, culturing it—yields a more fully flavored butter. Start by pouring a quart of the best-quality organic heavy cream into a large bowl; then cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the cream sit at room temperature (ideally, around 68 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit), undisturbed, for six hours so that it begins to sour slightly. In the meantime, line a colander with cheesecloth and set it inside another bowl.

1. Begin slowly whisking the cream using a balloon whisk; as the cream reaches the soft-peak stage, speed up the whisking motion.

2. Butterfat, in the form of tiny granules, will begin to accumulate on the sides of the bowl as it separates from the buttermilk (the liquid portion of cream); continue whisking until the butterfat granules are about half the size of a pea.

3. Pour the entire contents of the bowl into the cheesecloth-lined strainer and let the mixture drain for several minutes.

4. Gather the ends of the cheesecloth together and squeeze, pushing downward to extract as much additional liquid as possible; then unwrap the butter solids from the cheesecloth. (Reserve the butter milk to use in your favorite biscuit recipe, if you like.)

5. Pour cool water over the butter and rinse, carefully squeezing and folding the mass in on itself, until the water runs clear.

6. Put the butter into a bowl and sprinkle it with 1⁄2 teaspoon kosher salt.

7. Using a wooden spoon, smear the butter mass repeatedly against the side of the bowl to aerate it and thoroughly incorporate the salt; pour off any additional liquid the butter may release.

8. Using the wooden spoon, transfer the salted butter onto the center of a piece of wax paper and form it into a single, smooth-sided brick.

9. Wrap the butter tightly in the wax paper and refrigerate it overnight before you use it, to allow its flavor to develop. It will keep for about three weeks.

here is what i learned while making this butter:

• whisking it by hand is a damn pain in the ass. i have never whisked my own whipped cream (i have always used a hand mixer) so i did not realize that you are going to be whisking and whisking and whisking and thinking that nothing is happening for a loooong time. finally, all of a sudden, you will witness a miraculous transformation! i am not kidding you. i started yelling "wow! wow! wow!" when it happened.
• if you are like me, you are instinctively programmed to know exactly when your butter is at the right stage of each of the steps in the recipe. there were no pictures in the magazine, and unfortunately i still don't have my camera so i couldn't take any, but i just knew at each point when the granules were big enough, when all the water was squeezed out, etc.
• the smell of the cheesecloth after you take the butter out of it is amazing. i have never smelled anything like it. it is so sweet and fresh and dairy-ish. that smell alone would have made this process worth it.
  
• homemade butter truly is in a class of its own. it is so much more delicious and rich and creamy than land-o-lakes. i am serious, i was eating this butter by itself. mmmmmmmmm...

i am trying to save this butter to bring to brunch at a friend's house tomorrow, but i am scared i am going to get back into it tonight! maybe i can just cut a little off the end and no one will notice...