Making butter

I attended a Slow Food Toronto event this Saturday aimed at introducing people to Community Shared Agriculture options around Toronto as well as other food initiatives such as the awesome Greenest City initiative in Parkdale, here in TO. It was also great to hang out with Shannon Holton from KEG. But the highlight of the event for me was finding out how easy it is to make the most delicious, creamy butter. All you need is a small plastic container with a lid, heavy cream, and two marbles. All it takes is pouring an inch or two of heavy cream in the container with the marbles, putting the lid on, and shake, shake, shake. After a couple of minutes the sound of the marbles start going fainter until it gets to a point when you don’t hear anything moving inside since the cream have gotten so thick. But you keep shaking, shaking, shaking and soon enough the buttermilk separates. The key is to keep shaking until the butter is one compact chunk. It doesn’t take very long; maybe 5 minutes? I’ll time it next time… Yes, because once you make it once, there will be plenty of next times! Back to the recipe – once the butter is ready, strain the buttermilk and rinse the water in cold water until the water comes out clear and you have cleaned it of all the buttermilk. Should you leave any buttermilk on the butter, it would spoil in the fridge. You can of course add salt, herbs, or whatever strikes your fancy when you first add the cream to the container to make different flavours of butter. More detailed instructions here. Some pictures of my butter making – don’t mind the quality, the light was awful and I’m too excited t get this post up quickly to mind about fixing them up on photoshop: