How to Make Homemade Butter Recipe (w/ Video) | Bigger Bolder Baking (2024)

FAQs

How to Make Homemade Butter Recipe (w/ Video) | Bigger Bolder Baking? ›

Put your desired amount of heavy whipping cream into a butter churn (I recommend 2 cup's worth) and agitate until the butter separates into a lump. This will only take 10 minutes or so. Drain butter churn into a bowl with cheese cloth. This liquid is now your buttermilk and the solids are your butter.

Always buy heavy cream or whipping cream for churning butter. Any brand will do. You need the higher fat content. Heavy cream is approximately 40% butterfat and 60% milk solids and water.

Butter isn't that expensive — it's about $3 per pound at the wholesale level. Cream costs roughly $3.50 for 16 ounces, or less if you buy a larger carton. That means the price of making your own butter isn't much more than buying it in the store, and often you can get organic cream cheaper than organic butter.

Homemade Butter Recipe Tips

Here's a tip: If you start with one quart of cream (32 ounces), you'll make about one pound of butter (16 ounces, or four sticks) and two cups of buttermilk.

The cream from Jersey cows produces the best butter because of its higher fat content milk, plus the fact that their fat is dispersed in larger globules than milk from other types of cows and tends to churn into butter more easily.

If the cream is not turning into butter after whipping for an extended period, it may be due to factors such as the cream being too cold, the mixer speed being too low, or the cream not having a high enough fat content. Try increasing the speed of the mixer and ensuring the cream is at room temperature.

Homemade butter's shelf life depends on how thoroughly you extract the buttermilk. If a substantial amount of buttermilk remains, it will sour within a week, otherwise homemade butter can keep for up to 2-3 weeks in the fridge.

After making the butter, put it in a large bowl and add honey. Once the butter has solidified and been rinsed in ice water, place it in a large bowl to mix in added flavors with a spoon. I used 1 ½ tablespoons of honey, but feel free to use more or less depending on your personal tastes.

When you make your own butter, you can add just the amount of salt you prefer. (To replicate the salt level of store-bought butter, use a scant 1/4 teaspoon table salt per 4 ounces (113g) of homemade butter.)

Can I use sour cream to make butter? ›

I love making my own butter and jams for toast. I have found it's very important to use a natural sour cream that doesn't have any thickeners (like Guar gum) when making this recipe.

If you're planning on using it softened you can leave it out overnight, but definitely not any longer than 12 hours. This recipe is written using a pint of heavy cream (aka 16 oz, aka 2 cups) and makes approximately 6.25 oz butter. For reference, one stick of butter (½ cup) is 4 oz.

To make butter from cream, the cream is shaken so that the fat particles get shaken out of position and clump together with other fat particles. The clumping first allows tiny air bubbles to be trapped in the cream, forming a light and airy product you might have had, called whipped cream.

Homemade butter's shelf life depends on how thoroughly you extract the buttermilk. If a substantial amount of buttermilk remains, it will sour within a week, otherwise homemade butter can keep for up to 2-3 weeks in the fridge.