A great many years ago my father milked our Jersey cow and my mother skimmed off the cream for home-churned butter. She used a hand-cranked churn that looked like a gallon wide-mouth glass jar. The cap had a handle on top for turning the wooden blades that projected down into the cream. She even had a special stool that she sat on while churning her butter.
Today, most people who want to try making their own butter would probably prefer to use a food processor or blender, which will do the job much quicker than the hand-cranked churn my mother used, and with much less physical effort.
Weston A. Price considered spring butter to be one of the most important foods. Price was the nutritional expert who traveled around the world to find the healthiest people. He discovered that traditional cultures that included spring butter in their diets were healthier and had stronger teeth than people who did not have access to this source of important vitamins. Price believed the "magic" was in the green grass the cows ate during the springtime. Even at other times of the year, butter from grass-fed cows will taste better than store-bought.
Jersey cows produce a very high-fat milk, especially in the spring and early summer when there's plenty of nutritious grass. That's why my mother always had lots of cream on hand. She made sweet butter from uncultured cream, but older traditions call for letting the cream naturally ferment for a few days in a cool room. This creates a less-sweet butter with more complex flavors. Some people believe the beneficial bacteria that cause the cream to ferment, like the live cultures in yogurt, are important additions to the diet.
Whether your home-churned butter is sweet or cultured, it will taste remarkably better than anything you can buy at the store. Home-churned butter also has more butterfat than most commercial butter, so it makes tasty home-baked breads and pastries that really stand out from the crowd.
If you'd like to make your own home-made butter, you don't need a Jersey cow, and you don't need an old-fashioned hand-cranked churn - but you'll definitely get the best results if you find a local source of fresh-from-the-cow cream.
The quality of your butter depends entirely on the quality of the cream you started with. Cream from cows that have daily access to all the good spring grass they can eat will make the most flavorful butter with the deepest yellow color. Many commercial dairies do not allow their cows onto pasture, so they never taste green grass. That's why there's such a big difference in flavor between the store-bought and home-churned butter, especially if you can find milk from a local cow.
To make your butter, pour room-temperature cream into a blender or food processor. Run the machine for short bursts of just a few seconds at a time, and check the cream between each burst. Before long, you'll see butter begin to float on the top of the cream. Now add just a little bit of cold water and run the machine again for a few seconds. The butter will separate from the buttermilk.
The next chore is to wash the buttermilk out of the butter.
First, carefully remove just the butter from the blender or food processor and place it in a bowl of cold water. The liquid that is left behind in the blender is buttermilk, and you can drink it or use it in baking. There will still be some buttermilk mixed in with the butter in your bowl, and you want to remove as much of it as you can so the butter will stay fresh longer.
My mother used a very large, flat wooden tool that was made especially for this purpose, but any large spoon will do. Push down on the butter to squeeze out the buttermilk into the water, then pour the water out of the bowl and add some more cold water. Do this several times until the water remains clear. Then press out all the water one last time.
You may now add salt if you like, and then store your home-churned butter in the refrigerator. Or, better yet, take it straight to the table and eat it with home-baked bread. What a treat for the family that will be!
