I read about this in my doctor’s waiting room in – I shit you not – a women’s magazine. Mediterranean/French style easy homemade butter! They adressed several different seasonings and further uses in the article, but the basic procedure is always the same. All you need is a food processor and half a liter of heavy cream (get the real enchilada: 30% fat). After having my TBE shot, I knew what I had to do…
What you want to do is to separate the solids in the cream (i.e. fat) from the liquids (i.e. Buttermilk). Avantgardistic culinary protagonists have done this for a thousand years, but nowadays ultra modern food processing technology 🙂 can give us a hand and make this actually simple process even easier. Add the cream to the food processor’s bowl and start whipping with a whisk on high power.
The process only took me about eight minutes, just wait until butter and buttermilk have well separated, then drain off the buttermilk thoroughly in a colander. Now rinse and knead the butter in a bowl of cold water for two or three times, each time discarding the resulting cloudy water. Finally knead/pat it in a dry bowl (professionals seem to do this with special wooden spoons) again disposing of any water that might appear. Done.
You can easily turn this into salted butter by adding 0.75 – 1% salt to the finished butter and knead it again for a couple of minutes in order for the salt to dissolve.
These 500ml of cream make up for around 150 g of smooth and creamy self made butter. Fill into a sealable jar and store.