We've all been affected during this quarantine. You visit the store one week and you can't find any toilet paper, the next week there's no bread, and during one of our shopping trips the butter was completely wiped out. What is the saying..."necessity is the mother of invention", right?
Well, I'm not talking about inventing here. But, what I've been finding is that I am re-discovering a more "historical" way of living. In my family, my mother and my grandmother worked full time. Therefore, as I grew up we didn't make our own bread, we didn't can...we bought bread, we bought cake mixes, jams etc... We did this to make ends meet. We bought items, so that there was time for mom to clean the house, make dinner after a long day of work, make sure our homework was done etc...
Well, for the last few weeks, we've been quarantined at home. And, while I am working from home and helping my kids with their schoolwork, I am also re-discovering some long lost skills of a) sometimes making due with what you have, b) sometimes going without and c) learning that there are foods that I can make at home instead of buying at the store.
One of the easiest things to make that we've discovered is butter! It's literally one or two ingredients. Word of warning though, it does take a fair amount of arm muscles and that's where family team members come in!
We started with heavy whipping cream. And, that's all you really need. We did two batches because we were also running this as an experiment. One batch was simply the whipping cream and the second batch was the whipping cream plus a pinch of Himalayan Sea Salt. If you'd like though...there are many, many choices for adding to your butter: honey, cinnamon, garlic, Italian seasoning...really this list could be endless!
After you've bought your heavy whipping cream, you'll need a container to shake it in. We started by filling two glass jars (almost to the brim) and we started shaking. We discovered very quickly that this was a mistake. The cream expands as you shake it, and ours ran out of room. We shook it for more than 10 minutes and it did not change it's consistency. So, I had to scoop out the cream and put it into a larger jar that had more room. I'd say you only want your jar half full. And, then it was back to shaking.
We all took turns in the shaking process. When one of us would get tired, we'd trade off and continue to shake.
After, maybe 20 minutes or so of shaking, the cream began to form a ball and you could see a thin, white, watery liquid in with the butter. The butter with the pinch of salt in it seemed to form solid butter just a bit faster than the cream without the salt. I poured the "buttermilk" off and continued to shake for just a couple more minutes. But, really at this point it's done.
I carefully put my little ball of butter in a cheesecloth and gave it a gentle squeeze to remove a little more of the buttermilk.
And, that's it! It's ready to eat. After our family taste-test, it was decided that the butter with the salt in it was better than the one without. After the taste testing was complete I wrapped them in wax paper and put them in labeled baggies to store in the fridge. The butter does harden in the fridge, so you have to take it out and let it warm up to room temperature to use it again. Our butter only lasted a week, and tasted great until it was gone.
Conduct your own experiment and see which one you like better!
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