Homemade Butter
Add homemade butter to the list of new things I’ve tried lately. Over the past year, I’ve been on a quest to consume less processed and more nutrient dense foods. Throughout this journey I’ve been drawn to the paleo style of eating, because it looks at food sources: not only what we’re eating, but what the animals were eating before we were eating them. What I like about the paleo advocates is that they look at the science involved in raising healthy food, so it seems more practical and less emotional to me. I think it’s important to look at my food sources, whether the food is considered paleo or not. That brings me to raw milk.
While my consumption of dairy products has decreased over the past few months, I still love them. The fact that I feel good when I eat them leads me to believe that I should continue to consume them. Given that I am putting this in my body, I have started paying attention to articles about milk and how it is processed, and what is going on in the bodies of the cows who are producing the milk. I’ve seen a few articles about raw milk and am finding it very interesting to read about the pros and cons of pasteurization and homogenization. One of the farmers at our local farmers market sells raw milk, so I bought some earlier this week to give it a try. The farmer shared the reasons she believes raw milk to be healthy and she told me how to make butter. I couldn’t wait to get home and turn into Laura Ingalls and make my own butter.
Here’s what I did: I let the milk sit in the refrigerator long enough to separate. In my case, I left it overnight. Once I could see the cream line through the milk jug, I poured some of the cream into a jar with a lid. I let the cream sit on the counter for a few minutes to warm up a little. Then I shook it for about 5-8 minutes. The butter just started clumping together.
Once I could see that the butter had separated from the liquid, I poured off the liquid into a different container. It didn’t dawn on me until I was pouring off the liquid that this was buttermilk! You would think that I’m some kind of city girl or something, not raised in the San Joaquin Valley, some of the richest farmland in the world! {I drank the buttermilk right after I took the photos – Yum!}
I rinsed the butter with cold water, then added some salt. It was sweet goodness!
We ate the butter on some zucchini that we grilled with our steaks that night. I’m not sure if it was so sweet because of the raw milk or because I was so proud of myself for making butter. It wasn’t rocket science and didn’t require the skills of a master artist, but making butter gave me a feeling of being self-sufficient. It also made me think about re-reading the Little House books.
I drank some of the cream from the raw milk in my coffee.
I drank some milk, too, and it was good. I didn’t drink nearly as much as I normally would because it tasted so thick compared to the 1% milk we’ve been drinking for years at our house. I really like the idea of raw milk from grass fed cows, so I’m going to keep reading and researching to see if the science backs up the feeling in my gut. (Haha, that was a paleo pun!) Do you drink raw milk? Did your parents grow up drinking raw milk? Let me know in the comments.
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