When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, but what If life gives you 4 big tubs of cream?...... You make butter of course!
I was given a Kilner butter churner for Christmas, which is something Ive wanted for some time, as it looks so retro, plus looks to be a fun way of making your own butter, which fits into my plan of self sustainability, and reducing food waste.
I was lucky enough to come across double cream being sold off for 20p per tub in mylocal supermarket, and so invested in 4 pots so I could experiment!
It’s a pretty simple method, whip the cream until the buttermilk and butter separate and viola, homemade butter!
The churner is a fun way to do it, but a food mixer with a whisk will do just as good a job, so you don’t need to spend money on specialist equipment!
It's not the fastest job ever, as you have to crank the mechanism for around 15 minutes or so for the separation process to complete, but I did this while watching TV, so the it wasn't a problem!
I had never made butter before, and I kick myself that I hadn’t thought of it before as it is so easy! I used cream that was almost out of date, hence why it was so cheap, and it worked fine and tastes good! I added a little salt for taste and have popped the excess in the freezer for a later date, and it made a lot of butter, so this method was far cheaper than buying butter, I reckon I got an easy 5 packs of butter from the 4 tubs of cream, and at around £1.70 for a pack of butter, it’s a substantial saving, plus nicer knowing you made it yourself!
You can flavour the butter as well, of course, I added so parsley and garlic to one of the batches of butter, and we ended up with a delicious garlic butter, which made fab garlic bread, and has been used for cooking several times.
I did see some fab recipe ideas for flavoured butters on the BBC Good Food Magazine website and will be giving these a whirl shortly!
The image shows a great way to store the butters, simply by dolloping butter onto pieces of cling film or greaseproof paper, and squeezing the butter into a sausage shape. Twist the ends and you then have easy to store, well protected, butters that take up less room than putting the butter into a bowl, and allows you to simply cut off a chunk when you need it.
I tend to freeze the butter when in these sausage shapes, as it will then last for some time longer than just being refrigerated, and again is very easy to just slice a piece off of, when needed, and it defrosts really quickly too!
The process also gives you buttermilk as well, which can be used for a wide range of recipes, making this a really frugal way of using up excess cream, as the whole thing can be used, and nothing wasted, saving money and reducing food waste...