Today was the day I started the process of making homemade cultured European style butter.

First of all, I am not a photographer nor a food blogger. 

I know that. If you want fancy pictures, visit Molly Wizenberg's blog.

Making homemade butter sounds daunting, but it's possibly the easy thing in the world. Your equipment is stuff you probably (and SHOULD) have around the house. The only thing I had to buy was the cream, yogurt and cheese cloth. 

 What you need:

-A recipe. My mom got me America's Test Kitchen: DIY Cookbook. This is my first recipe EVER from the book, but if you ever want to get into making your own Greek yogurt, butter, jams etc. I recommend this book. There ARE other butter recipes out there, but I trust America's Test Kitchen. 

-Starter culture. The book recommends using Stonyfield Thick n Creamy-whole milk yogurt. It has six active cultures in it AND it's organic. You need 1/2 a cup. 

-Pasteurized, BUT NOT ULTRA PASTEURIZED heavy cream. If you live in the GR area, Country Fresh doesn't ultra-pasteurize. It did take me a while to find this "special" heavy cream. READ the package to make sure it's just flat out pasteurized.  

-2 quart jar with lid.

-thermometer (optional, but really helpful).

-measuring cup. 

Not pictured: 

-cheese cloth. Or linen. 

 Basically you shake the yogurt and cream in the jar--cover with triple layer of cheese cloth and let sit at room temp until it gets thick--about a day or so. The recipe said let it sit at 70 degrees room temp. If you keep your house cold (we're pretty cheap and never let ourselves turn the thermostat up higher than 65* in the Winter), the cultures or whatever will take longer to "do their thing." I taped a sticky note to the jar for reference. 

**I will update and add more pictures once the cream/culture mixture thickens up. The next process is to churn it into butter**