Then, when I was buying the cream for the cobbler, I found that heavy cream was on sale. I though "Oooh, it's practically a sign!" So I bought an extra pint of cream.
And today, while also cleaning out the fridge, I did it. :D
Here's a beauty shot of the lemons and garlic I bought to flavor the compound butters.
Making the butter was shockingly easy. Put it in the mixer, whip the cream, keep whipping past the point of whipped cream, then suddenly, it will clump and become butter!
(Note the plastic "splash guard" I taped on.)
Aaaaaaaand here's the final product.
I looked up some recipes for compound butter, but in the end, mocked up my own mixtures base on what I had.
I made (from bottom to top): blackberry & mint, lemon & basil, roasted garlic, and then just salted butter (accidentally over salted slightly, darn it).
It is tasty, but then again, it's butter - of course it's tasty. I can't really detect an actual flavor difference, but the texture seems a bit smoother for some reason. I'm not sure. It's not cheaper than buying butter (of course), but it would definitely be something I'd think about doing again if I were making more compound butter. I think I will try that again, but perhaps will puree the herbs a bit, rather than mincing them. Hmmm... we'll see.
8 comments:
One of my favourite memories as a child was the "time wasters" my Mother would come up with to keep me occupied. One of her favourite was making butter. She would skim the cream off the milk that my Dad would bring in from the barn, put it in a big jar and have me sit on the floor and roll it back and forth....for hours!
Yours look delicious, and gives me an idea of how to spend some of my extra time....mmmmm, herb and garlic butter!
Different mix of olefins in the cream than the milk extracts they use for commercial butter, that's why it's smoother, the average molecular weight of the biopolymers is lower, and there are probably more hydrophilic groups on some of the proteins trapped in there.
You also have no preservatives in there, so be ware of premature rancidity. Keep it out of the light. Oleic acid is not your friend!
Mmmm, butter.
Yes, that that John the Scientist said. I was going to make it a bit more simple by saying that home-made butter goes rancid a lot more quickly than commercial. But then, anything homemade with simple ingredients does. This gives you an idea of how many preservatives everyday regular stuff we buy has. As I have always said: when you find weevils in your flour you know that it is very good stuff. Weevils know the good stuff.
Thanks for the warnings. I froze half of what I made and I don't expect the rest to last the remainder of the week.
I put a cap of water over the butter to keep the air away from it. I understand that this helps.
Speaking of preservatives... shredded cheese (like Kraft) seems to last Forever. Must be 50% preservative.
YUM. I haven't had homemade butter in years.
Huh. All you have to do is keep whipping whipping cream? Neat. ;) (*grew up in a city, hopefully is excused*)
I'm always suspicious of foods that don't go bad. I had a block of cheap parmesan that sat around in my fridge for years and never molded - I didn't like the taste but didn't want to throw "good" (edible) food out, so it just sat there for a really long time...
Or bananas that never turn brown. Dole started selling those a while back, and they also taste funny, so I stopped buying Dole.
Post a Comment