Butter

OK, so making butter might seem a bit of a faff and not something you'd usually do at home, but it's something I enjoy for 4 reasons. 1 - I like making my own compund butters, 2 - I have excess buttermilk for other dishes, 3 - its a great workout! and 4 - I just like seeing where my food comes from. Things like making butter is a bit of a lost art in my opinion.

Luckily you don't need a butter churn, or any other kind of flash gadget, all you need to make a small amount of butter at home is a large glass jar.The only ingredient you need is double cream (or heavy cream as I think it's called in some parts of the world). Thats it. We'll get onto seasonings and stuff in a bit. Don't buy milk, it won't work. Don't by single cream, it won't work.



Pour the cream into the jar so it's half full. Put the lid on tight. Now shake. Shake lots. Really lots.



At first you'll hear a splashing sound, after a while that will stop and it'll go silent. At this point you've made whipped cream and the jar will be opaque white.



After a lot more shaking it'll start sounding slushy again and eventually you'll hear and feel something thudding around in the jar. That's butter, and the liquid it's sloshing about in is buttermilk.



Congratulations, wipe the sweat from your brow. It'll probably take around 10 to 15 minutes hard shaking to get to this stage. You've done the hard work, now to wash it. Pour out and reserve the buttermilk, leaving the lump of butter inside. Fill the jar with cold water and slosh it around. Pour the water out and repeat until the water in the jar is clear.



The aim is to get as much buttermilk out of the butter as possible, as leaving it in there will cause the butter to go rancid and it won't keep as long. So now tip your butter out onto a flat surface, like maybe a chopping board or plate (in my case a black one so I can see the white liquid better) and press out the buttermilk with the back of a wooden spoon. Get as much out as you possibly can.



Once thats done, your butter is probably going to need some cooling down after all that handling, so put it in the fridge to firm up a bit. Out of 300ml of cream I got 160g of butter and 120ml buttermilk.



Now you have a finished unsalted butter, but rather than stop there lets fancy it up a bit. By mixing in a few ingredients we can turn this into a maitre d'hotel butter. Take the butter out of the fridge before it goes too hard and add the following ingredients:
Half a tsp of paprika
Juice of quarter a lemon
About a tablespoon of finely chopped parsley
Pepper



Mix all them in and dollop the butter onto a bit of greaseproof (baking) paper.



Roll the butter up into a sausage shape and twist the ends to make it into a bonbon shape.



Now put this back in the fridge to harden. Leave it overnight to harden and for the flavours to develop a bit. In the morning you can treat yourself to some fancy butter.

This is amazing for cooking with, particularly fish or chicken.



Now, about that buttermilk. This stuff is perfect for poaching fish or chicken in, or you might want to use it to make an irish soda bread:

For that you'll need:

210ml Buttermilk
125g Plain flour
125g Wholemeal flour
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp salt




Mix up the dry ingredients and pour in the buttermilk. Gently mix it up into a sticky dough, the secret to a good soda bread is not to be too rough handling it and to work as quickly as you can. Tip onto a floured surface and quickly work the dough by gently folding it until it's smooth and well mixed. Shape it into a ball and put it on a floured baking tray, press down gently with your hand to flatten slightly, then make two deep cuts in a cross.



Bake it in a preheated oven at 200degC for 30 minutes. When it's done eat it as soon as possible, you can spread your home made butter on it!





You can make a whole bunch of other compound butters of course, the most useful I can think of is garlic butter, just salt the butter, add a couple of tablespoons of chopped parsley and mix in the best part of a bulb of garlic, or as much to your taste. You can use it to stuff a chicken breast...



you can cook mushrooms in it...



you can spread it on a pizza base and make garlic bread.

or you could slice a potato and put it between the slices to make hassleback potatoes.

There are plenty of other flavoured butters to try. Just pre-load the butter with whatever fresh herbs you like to use, maybe a tarragon one for cooking chicken, or rosemary for lamb. Season with a bit of fresh salt and pepper, coarse sea salt adds a lovely texture, and maybe even some spice such as chilli or nutmeg.