A while ago I made corn pone for one of my projects. It doesn’t have very many ingredients if you go old school. My recipe called for cornmeal, baking soda and powder, and buttermilk. I forgot to pick up buttermilk. So I learned how to make it from cream, which I happened to have. It turns out if you beat cream a long time it will become butter and buttermilk. Here’s how it went:
I put the cream in a tupperware container with an extra awesome top that seals really well. I shook it like a polaroid picture for a long time but only managed to make slightly stiff cream. Next I put the cream in a blender and hit go. It got frothy like a frappe. Then the cream got thick enough to form soft peaks. Then nothing changed. Then still nothing. Then I noticed little round dots of yellow like fat globs sticking to the inside of the blender. Then there were a few more. Then the whole blender was filled with milky liquid and whitish solid bits like cooked milk scum. That was my butter. It was so much tastier than it looked. I strained the contents, reserving the liquid in a measuring cup. So I had a measuring cup full of buttermilk. And a strainer full of fresh butter. Following advice from the internet, I washed the butter. Under ice water, the butter actually sticks together like dough. You wash it by squishing and working the butter underwater as if it’s clay. After a couple rinses, the water stays mostly clear and you can stop. Drain the water, work the butter just a tad to remove pockets of water, and refrigerate.
The corn pone was far less spectacular. It was dry and crumbly and tasted kinda like sand. So much for that recipe!
Then today I made bread and decided to try butter again too. The bread came out incredibly nice for my first try. The butter I did a larger batch. It turns out that sometimes a blender isn’t great for butter making when the frothy cream sticks to itself and makes an air pocket around the chopper part. I switched to a hand mixer halfway through and then things went as before. So I guess the key to great butter is to use at least two devices to make it.
Homemade bread with homemade butter is my new fave!