Home-made Butter

At the yeasted doughs workshop on Saturday, which, incidently went really well, the girls (all girls this time) I think had a great time and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves too. They made Pain au Chocolat, Croissants, two different types of Foccacia, wholemeal and granary rolls and iced buns with glitter icing (we had to fit the glitter in somewhere and you don’t get iced buns from the supermarket with glitter on!).

Anyway, as well as doing yeast experiments and loads of kneading we also made butter. This seems to be a bit topical at the moment and it was soooo easy and tasted great.

All you need is a small tub of double cream and a jam jar with tightly fitting lid plus 30 minutes of undivided attention. It is ideal if the cream is just about on it’s sell-by date, remove it from the fridge about an hour before you want to use it so it comes to room temperature (I know, this goes against all my food safety rules but you need the cream really on the turn if at all possible, if it’s really fresh it will just take longer). Fill the jam jar to ONE THIRD full, screw the top on tightly and shake – for anything from 10 – 30 minutes. Don’t stop shaking, if the phone goes, you’ve got another hand, if you’re a woman this is no problem you can multitask to shake and talk at the same time, if you’re a man, tell the caller you’ll call them back – sexist but true.

Keep on shaking, don’t give up, if a group of 9 and 10 year old girls can do it so can you. The cream will start to thicken to a whipped cream texture – KEEP SHAKING, pretend you’re playing the maracas on a sun-drenched beach in Mexico. Suddenly, when you are at the point of giving up, the jar will start making a thudding, slooshing noise, if it’s a clear jar you will see the yellow butter slooshing around in a watery liquid. The watery liquid is buttermilk. Drain off the buttermilk and put into the fridge to use to make scones and plop the squidgy butter onto a clean, dry chopping board. Using either two wooden spoons or your hands genly pat and squeeze out the remaining buttermilk. Any buttermilk remaining in the butter will make the butter go sour so you need to keep doing this until the buttermilk is all suqeezed out. Once done, you can add a little salt, or sea salt to flavour, wrap in clingfilm and fridge. Fabulous on home made bread straight out of the oven.