Contented Life : Butter Part III

Once your butter/buttermilk/culture reaches 75*, stick the jar in the fridge for a few hours...or until it reaches 65* (or 60*?). Anyway, it HAS to be at this exact point for it to churn out right. If you are short on time, you can keep the jar in the fridge. Once ready to churn the butter, leave the jar out at room temp until it reaches 65* (a hour or so).

Once it reaches this point, you separate/churn the butter from the buttermilk. This is easily done via standing mixer. At this point, you have butter in less than 15-20 minutes. (My mixer is missing a lot of levers and things. Hey, it's 13--that's thirteen--years old!)

Churning our butter

Dump your jar in the mixing bowl, attach the whisk and let'er rip. The book recommended cover the bowl top with plastic wrap, it may get a little messy and the goal to contain the liquids to inside the bowl. As soon as you see liquid splash the plastic, stop. This whole process--start to finish--5 minutes.

Scrap your concoction into a strainer that's been triple lined with cheese cloth. It's helpful to put the strainer in a bowl...the liquid is buttermilk and makes for some amazing chocolate chip scones :)

Gather the ends of the cloth and squeeze as much buttermilk out as you can. The liquid makes the butter go rancid much, much faster.

Separating the butter from the buttermilk

The author of this recipe prepped a bowl of ice water. Scrape/dump your liquid-less butter into a medium bowl. Using the ice water, rinse out any extra buttermilk that's larking inside your butter--the author poured a cupful of water onto the butter and smashed it on/into the butter. After a while, dump the water and repeat the rinsing process, do so until the water runs clear--about six washes. It gets more and more "buttery" looking after each wash. After the final rinse, discard the water.

After the final rinse, dump the butter onto a large cutting board or piece of wax paper and shape into anything your heart desires. The author stated you'll get 12oz of final product, however, I got 8oz. There's a lot of factors that could have gone wrong for me--Next time I'll be careful to not waste anything :)