How to make butter

What is actually happening

Cream is fat droplets suspended in water, each droplet wrapped in a membrane. Whipping incorporates air and the droplets begin to clump around the bubbles — that is whipped cream.

Keep going and the mechanical action breaks those membranes. The fat coalesces into a single mass and squeezes out the water it was suspended in. That mass is butter and the liquid is buttermilk.

The transition is sudden. Cream goes from stiffly whipped to grainy to visibly separated within thirty seconds, and it splashes when it does, so cover the bowl.

The method

Whip, drain, wash, salt. FoodHQ does not publish salt percentages, pH figures or keeping times for home fermenting. Those are safety numbers, they are set by a food safety authority rather than by a cookery writer, and the right ones depend on what you are fermenting and where you are. In the UK the Food Standards Agency is the authority — use a recipe from it or from another body with the same standing, and treat this page as the explanation of why that recipe is shaped the way it is.

1. Start with double or whipping cream at cool room temperature. Fridge-cold cream takes much longer.
2. Whip it in a mixer, a food processor, or a jar shaken by hand. It will pass through whipped, then grainy, then suddenly split.
3. Stop as soon as you see yellow grains and thin liquid. Cover the bowl before this point — it splashes.
4. Strain through a sieve, keeping the buttermilk.
5. Tip the butter into a bowl of iced water and knead it with a spatula or your hands. The water clouds. Pour it off and repeat with fresh water until it runs clear.
6. This washing step is not optional. Buttermilk left in the butter is what makes home-made butter go off quickly.
7. Knead in salt if you want salted butter, then press into a block or roll it in greaseproof paper.

Variations and what to do with the buttermilk

• Cultured butter. Stir a few spoonfuls of live yoghurt or buttermilk into the cream and leave it at room temperature overnight before churning. The result is tangier and more complex, and it is what good French butter is.
• Salted butter, with flaky salt kneaded in, which also helps it keep.
• Flavoured butters — garlic and parsley, anchovy, miso, chilli, seaweed — rolled in paper and chilled.
• Clarified butter or ghee, made by melting and separating out the milk solids.
• The buttermilk is not the same as cultured shop buttermilk, but it works in scones, soda bread and pancakes.
• In a marinade, where it tenderises gently.
• Frozen in portions, since it does not keep long.

Notes

Which cream

Double or whipping cream. Single cream has too little fat to churn.

Temperature

Cool room temperature churns fastest. Fridge-cold cream takes far longer.

Yield

Around half the weight of the cream ends up as butter, and the rest as buttermilk.

Washing

Essential. Residual buttermilk is what spoils home-made butter.

Keeping

Shorter than shop butter unless well washed and salted. Keeping times are a Food Standards Agency matter.

Common questions