Butter

We've been meaning to post this for awhile, but with starting a new rotation down by Pittsburgh, it got pushed onto the back burner.

In the "Nourishing Traditions" book by Sally Fallon, she gives a recipe for making butter - it's incredibly easy.  We siphoned off the cream from our milk.  That's the nice thing about whole, raw milk - the cream rises to the top and you can skim part of it off to make ice cream, whip cream, or, in this case, butter.  We left the cream out for about 8 hours to sour it a little, added a teaspoon of salt, put it in our food processor, and turned it on.  About 20 minutes later, we were done.  We drained the butter milk, transferred the butter into a metal bowl and patted the butter with a wooden spoon to squeeze out the rest of the butter milk.  

Here are some of the pictures the we took of the butter making process.  As you can see, Liliana was my helper throughout the whole process.  The only downside is that you can't leave the butter out, otherwise it will continue to sour and leaving it in the refrigerator made the butter hard.  The increasing sour taste didn't bother me, but Heather didn't really like it.  

For those of you who are squeemish about leaving raw milk or cream out on the counter, you don't have to sour the cream at all.  We haven't tried that yet.  Maybe when life gets a little less hectic!  

For those of you who are wondering why we left the cream out to sour, souring the milk gives time for the natural bacteria in the milk (the lactobacillus species, which is the bacteria in yogurt and kefir) to start to break down some of the milk sugars and proteins.  This makes the butter easier to digest.