Shake It Up: How to Make Butter at Home

My son recently came home from an field trip saying he had learned how to make butter. Indeed, they had been learning about the “olden days” at Van Hoosen Farm, which puts on some great programs for school field trips. 

My son said the butter they made tasted delicious, and he really wanted to show me how to do it.  

He begged me to purchase “heavy whipping milk” at the store for his experiment. “Heavy whipping cream?” I asked. Yes, that was it. So the next time I was picking up a few things at Hollywood Market (which I tend to use as my local 7-Eleven), I added a carton of heavy whipping cream to my basket.  

My son found a jar with a tight-sealing lid.  He left the cream sitting on the counter until it reached room temperature.  Then he poured the cream into the jar, screwed down the lid and began to shake the jar.  Because it was a very small amount of cream, it took only a minute or two before he cocked his head, listening. 

You can tell by the sound changing, he explained, that you no longer have a lot of liquid sloshing around. When he looked inside, it was almost there. A brief additional shaking and there was nothing left but butter. Magic!

This is the softest butter. It melts in your mouth immediately. It might be a trifle bland for some, in which case apparently you add a pinch of salt at some point.  We didn’t get that complicated. 

We had sweet, soft, creamy butter for our bread, and we were very pleased with ourselves. We put it in the fridge. Apparently it goes bad quickly otherwise. 

Then we went online and looked up the scientific reason why warming up and shaking turns cream into butter. It has something to do with banging the tiny globs of fat in the cream together. You’re supposed to have some leftover liquid when the butter forms, which is buttermilk, but we didn’t see any.  Maybe we needed more cream.  

So if my earlier column about got you psyched about homemade bread, now you can let the kids make a delicious spread to go along with it.