Making your own butter: everyone's doing it

The stars must have aligned somehow, and the world over was swept with the urge to make butter at home. My inspiration came a few weeks ago, when I found myself in a momentary cash crisis. In my refrigerator, I had a large amount of heavy cream, but no butter. As I faced the very real, very terrible specter or using the last pat of butter on my toast, I remembered some long-ago read magazine feature on making butter with kids (why with kids? child labor, I suppose). The suggestion, I remembered, was simple: put cream in jar. Screw on lid. Shake, rattle, and roll until butter appears.

So we set to work. My babysitter. My three-year-old. My husband. And me. We shook until our arms hurt. All.... right. Let's be honest. The husband's and three-year-old's attention span being what they are, my babysitter and I shook, and shook, and shook. Everyone was skeptical, except the three-year-old, who will believe anything. My babysitter thought I should add something... what, she didn't know, but it seemed insufficient. To please her, I added a touch of salt. Only minutes after I added the salt, the butter came together, and it was magical. I knew what would happen; that the cream would start feeling heavier and then, suddenly, the butter would break from the milk. But it was still impossible, when it happened, like the farmwife version of watching coal turn into diamonds.

No one could quite believe it, in my house, and everyone wanted to do it again! So over the next few days, we made butter two more times, finally resorting to the Cuisinart when everyone got tired of shaking. That was inspired - no matter when we added the salt, we found that shaking took at least 20-30 minutes, versus only five or so minutes with the Cuisinart. Afterward, we'd use the soft, creamy stuff with abandon, smeared on cornbread muffins, slathered on toast.

The third batch I made was the biggest, and the day afterward I finally read Andrew's post on making butter (oddly, he'd posted it the day after my first magical churn). As I read through comments and followed links, I wondered about that "squeezing the buttermilk out" stuff. Should I have done that? I walked into the kitchen.

There was my butter, in all its fresh-churned glory. And I bent over and took a whiff. Ewwwyuck! Sour butter.

Lesson learned: it's easy to make butter. But don't forget to squeeze out the buttermilk if you make more than you can use in one day.