The hosts delve into the history of butter, its industrialization, and the rise of margarine as a substitute.
They provide various methods of making butter using raw milk or excess cream, including equipment to use and different types of butter to make.
They also highlight the health benefits, including the immune-boosting properties of raw milk butter vs pasteurized (store-bought) butter, while emphasizing its superior taste.
The conversation covers the best practices for storing and packaging butter, as well as the many uses for excess butter such as for skin care and shining up leather.
The episode suggests different methods for making butter at home and emphasizes the importance of removing all buttermilk from the butter.
#HealthyEating #HomemadeButter #RawMilkButter,
Carol & Jamie of 2GalsHomesteading.com are your homesteading co-hosts. Jamie practices homesteading skills in town. Carol homesteads on the farm.
Timestamps
- [00:00:00] “Creating Confidence, Impact, and Change Through Homesteading (Intro)”
- [00:00:35] “Making Raw Milk Butter on Your Homestead”
- [00:00:52] Butter Production Process and Tips
- [00:02:32] The History of Butter Production
- [00:09:03] “Baking with Margarine vs. Butter”
- [00:10:16] “Make Your Own Butter with Raw Milk Cream”
- [00:15:09] “Finding Raw Milk Sources”
- [00:18:51] Getting Thick Cream from Whole Milk
- [00:22:35] Making Sweet Cream Butter or Cultured Butter
- [00:28:08] Buttermilk as a Milk Substitute and Choosing the Right Butter Churn
- [00:31:02] Making Butter: Washing, Salting, and Packaging
- [00:36:53] Storing and using Buttermilk as a Culture.
- [00:40:40] Raw Milk Butter for Skin Care and unique uses
- [00:45:28] “Benefits of Using Raw Milk Butter”
- [00:48:43] The Episode Summary
- [00:50:12] The Homestead Podcast, Sponsored by PeteCoSupply.com
Links
Transcript
Carol
We’d like to give a special thank you to PeteCoSupply.com for sponsoring our podcast.
Intro
Welcome to the homestead podcast. You are joining co-hosts, Carol and Jamie of 2galshomesteading.com. If you found yourself here, that means you are ready to take responsibility for what you eat, your family’s health, and your family’s well being while living a simpler life. You can do this and have fun saving money along the way. Let’s them help you unleash the homesteader within. By doing more with less, you will gain what is needed to create confidence, impact, and change in your life and the lives around you. Let’s start homesteading. Let’s start now.
Carol
From cow to butter. Making raw milk butter on your homestead. Hi, Jamie.
Jamie
Hi, Carol.
Carol
How are you today?
Jamie
I am good.
Carol
All right. Same here. Enjoying our nice weather. And our topic today is butter, and that is something that happens on my homestead about five times a week, if not every single day we make butter. All depends on how much fluid milk I have sold and whether we have cream that needs processing. And so it kind of fluctuates in there. But I would say, on average, we do butter on our farm five days at least, I would say so. And sometimes we do two batches in one day, which is eight to 10 lbs.
Jamie
Of butter in one batch or together?
Carol
Together.
Jamie
Okay.
Carol
Yeah. We yield three to £4 or should say three to £5 per batch. Kind of depends on the cow thickness of the cream and the age of the cream. And our churn only holds a little over a gallon. And so, for the most part, one quarter of cream gives you £1 of butter. That’s probably your average.
Jamie
Do you separate your cream and then do your butter the same day, or do you do your cream and then do butter the next day?
Carol
No, we separate our cream on day one, and we have found that it actually works better to have a little age on your cream. Okay. So you can do it the same day, but it seems like the yield is less. So it does better if you’ve separated your cream and you’ve let that cream chill for a day or two and then bring it back up to temperature. For us, that is right around 55 to 60 degrees. Works best with our milk, with our cream from on our farm. Now, I read other places.
Jamie
It’s different, I suppose environment and type of cow, what they’re fed.
Carol
Yeah. Amount of cream, how thick your cream is. All those things affect that. But I thought maybe we’d first start a little bit about the history of butter and how long butter has been around. My research took me all over the place.
Jamie
I didn’t go that deep.
Carol
Mine, it did. It took me all over. But I kind of gathered from several different websites, and they all kind of gave the same basic story that it’s probably been around since 9000 BC. Perhaps someone, a shepherd or somebody had sheep milk. And then it said milk, not cream. It said milk, put it in a sheepskin bag and tied it to the back of a sheep. And they went on a journey across to wherever, to market, to new fields, pastures, whatever. And at the end of that journey, he discovered when he took that milk bag off of the sheep, that he’s got this beautiful, wonderful, sweet treat in there. Have no idea if that’s true or not. I’ve heard the same thing about cheese and how that was discovered. But they talk about using, like, a calf stomach or a sheep stomach where they got that renin in there to make that. So that was a little bit different. But I’m not exactly sure if they just say milk and they really mean cream because you really can’t make butter from milk. You really have to separate the cream from the milk. In my research, that’s kind of what I found. And they all think it was just kind of a little accident. And originally, butter did not come from cows. They came from other domesticated animals such as sheep, goats and yaks. Cow butter is fairly new in the scope of how long butter has been around. Then my research took me to well, people stopped using animals to agitate their milk product to make butter. Then they just simply shaked it in a bag. In ancient Rome, butter was forbidden by their gods to consume. So they used it as they used it in cosmetics, and they used it for wound care. Isn’t that interesting?
Jamie
Yeah, because it would have been a fermented product back then, too. I know that fermented products work really good at wound care.
Carol
Yeah, I just thought that was really interesting. It was forbidden by the gods.
Jamie
Somebody made up that rule. They wanted all the butter for themselves.
Carol
And who didn’t snitch a little bit. It was also considered a sign of purity. And lots of times butter was used as something you give to the gods, a gift to gods.
Jamie
Maybe they would bless you from that type of thing. You weren’t supposed to eat it. You were supposed to give it to God.
Carol
Yeah.
Jamie
And then hence it was wasted.
Carol
Yeah.
Jamie
That’s really sad, isn’t it?
Carol
I also learned that the northern Europeans, it said due to the cold climate and this was off of Milkyday.com, they had a whole article on butter. They said that it was more popular as a use in northern European countries than in the southern European countries where ghee and olive oil, those things were used more. And that the Southern Europeans actually considered butter a barbaric item because Northern Europeans were not exactly the nicest people on the face of the earth.
Jamie
Yes, I’ve gathered that from reading histories and watching movies. I don’t know, I just thought that.
Carol
Was interesting, that they didn’t want to consume it because it was considered a barbaric food. Anyway, as my research into this went, it said that in 1860 is when industrialization of butter came about. So before that, most butter was made on the farm.
Jamie
On the homestead?
Carol
Yeah, on the homestead. They hand churned it, they industrialized it in the 1860s. And then by 1900, over half of the butter made in the United States was made in factories.
Jamie
That’s when the government started demanding it be past the milk be pasteurized, because that pathogens people were getting sick. Usually a cleanliness factor of people who’s handling the product.
Carol
Just trying to figure out when did pasteurization come about?
Jamie
But yeah, when did they start requiring that it had to be pasteurized?
Carol
I think it was actually in the 1950s that it required that all milk be pasteurized.
Jamie
Pasteurized.
Carol
But I was just trying to think when Louis Pasteur actually created the process of pasteurization. I don’t remember those dates on that.
Jamie
I don’t either.
Carol
I did read that at the end of the 1870s is when a Swedish engineer named Carl Gustof Patrick de Lavelle introduced the centrifugal cream separator. And that changed the industry completely instead of having to hand do that. And just a quick note to those people who are listening and know about dairy equipment. De Lavelle is a name. We actually have a de Lavelle milking system in our barn that is still around today. Okay, so he must have started the whole thing. I mean, we have bulk tank down there. All of our milkers are delevel. Our jar is delevel. I mean, we have a lot of de Lavell stuff in our so the.
Jamie
Name is still out there.
Carol
It’s still out there. And I assume that he probably founded the company or whatever. I didn’t go any to any further than that. When it was that in the late 1870s, a very long time. I didn’t even know that that was a Swedish company, to be honest, until I was doing this research here. And then, let’s see. I got to go back to my notes here quick. It says, on the rise of the 20th century, americans were consuming £18 of butter per capita. In today’s terms, that’s about one and a half sticks of butter per person on a weekly basis. And then the Great Depression hit and World War II, and butter suddenly became a luxury item and got very expensive. And so people stopped buying it or consuming it because they didn’t have a job or they didn’t have enough money. And that’s when Margarine showed up. Margarine was a cheap substitute for butter, not very good for us, as we know today. That’s how Margarine started showing up. And I know Margarine was actually supposed to be something else at one time.
Jamie
Yeah, I don’t remember. I’ve read it.
Carol
Yeah, it was like a non food item. And I think we’ve touched on that before.
Jamie
Yeah, I can’t remember.
Carol
But anyway, I just wanted to throw that in there. And now, of course, in the 1980s, then they were like, oh, cholesterol and butter is bad for you. So margarine was still a big thing, and it was a big thing in our home.
Jamie
Oh, yeah. They started coming out with name brand things that were they used the word butter in their label so that people would buy it.
Carol
We used butter on our table, but when it comes to baking, it was always margarine because margarine was cheap, extremely cheap. And our cookies, bars, anything we baked, bread, whatever, that was all margarine was used for all of that.
Jamie
I remember my mom buying butter in the big chunk of square when we were littler. But then at one point, she started buying more margarine. And I’m sure it was when I had four brothers and when they got to be teenagers and the food consumption went up, she was saving money somehow, I’m sure.
Carol
Not that we had lots of kids. There was only three of us kids, but we were poor. But dad insisted we have butter on the table. I could see that there was butter. It was always butter on the table. And margarine was used for other stuff because it didn’t taste like butter. I don’t care what they say, it.
Jamie
Doesn’T taste like no butter. Because I think the biggest thing was that it’s more spreadable.
Carol
Just true.
Jamie
Yeah, because you don’t spread butter out of the fridge.
Carol
No, you do not. Let’s see. Okay, so our focus is going to be talking about making butter on your homestead. Now you can make butter from storebought cream. We are going to focus on using raw milk and raw cream to make your butter for this discussion. So when we talk about it, we’re always going to be talking about raw butter. Skiing your own butter is actually quite a simple process. It is. You really just you need cream. You need a vessel to put it into that seals that has a lid on it, that’s airtight. Or it doesn’t leak.
Jamie
It doesn’t leak and you won’t make a mess.
Carol
You don’t need any other special equipment besides an arm that’s strong and thyme. Or you can make your butter in a jar by simply shaking it.
Jamie
And who hasn’t done that with their kids school? I was just going to say we.
Carol
Did it in like second grade for Thanksgiving. We made butter. And that’s what we did. We put cream in a jar and I don’t know, there might have been marbles in there, I don’t remember. But I remember everybody got take your turn shaking it over so bad. Yes. I mean, really, it’s not hard to do. Now, of course we don’t do that here. A little bit different process here. But it is as simple as that. If you want to do a little project and you want to keep your kids busy, that’s one way to do it. And it takes anywhere from ten to 20 minutes of shaking to get it to turn, because we did that a lot before we got our butter turn. We did it around here just to use up some of the excess cream that we had while we drink coffee. Everybody’s shaking court jar with cream in it. Personally, I think knowing how to make butter is a very valuable skill and allows you to use your milk in one more one more way. And I mean, who doesn’t love butter, really? If you’ve checked the price of butter lately in the store yeah. Being able to make your own, at least current at the time of this podcast, butter in the store is not cheap. I just priced it. I do believe in Walmart on their app, and I think Land of Lakes, which is a local minute, that’s a Minnesota brand, and they were at Walmart, had it on sale, and I believe it was $5 for a pound. And that was the sale price.
Jamie
Okay.
Carol
The regular price was closer to six something. I think if you have your own cow.
Jamie
Even my husband says he can taste the difference between store bought your butter. Oh, and I can, too. But he’s like, you can tell the difference.
Carol
Yeah. And of course the stuff in the store is pasteurized. I think that really makes a difference, too, in the flavor. And then, of course, your benefit of having raw milk or raw cream used for your butter because it just carries all those good things over. Let’s see what’s all in it. It’s got antioxidants, anti inflammatory.
Jamie
I think I saw that actually somewhere. I read that it was like it helps with weight loss, even though it goes against everything we were taught in the yeah, low fat was the thing.
Carol
In the was going to say. I believe that milk is a whole food, and so by consuming it, it has everything in it that helps you digest what’s all important in that milk. It’s a whole product. So you consume that and you can get all the vitamins and all this stuff without adding anything else to your diet. And so that carries over in your butter as well. If you’re using raw cream for your butter, according to rawfarmusa.com, raw milk is full of immune boosting vitamins. It’s a great source of healthy cholesterol, fatty acids, antioxidants, and also helps with nutrient absorption, which I just mentioned here about milk being a whole food. I will tell you that I do have some customers who do make butter from our milk. And these are homeschooling moms. These are your crunchy moms. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that’s what they are.
Jamie
That’s what they’re labeled.
Carol
They tell me that each kid gets a stick of butter and they just eat it that way.
Jamie
Oh, no.
Carol
That’s how much they believe in butter.
Jamie
The quality of butter and the benefits.
Carol
Of butter and the benefits of the butter. Now, I love butter, but I can’t do that. I thought that was really interesting. You talked about weight loss and stuff. I have somebody who makes butter and she actually makes kefir out of our cream. She eats an extremely high fat diet and she is built like a stick. Yes. And so I truly believe if you have your gut health correct, you can consume a lot of fat and still be a thin person. I won’t say that about myself.
Jamie
No, me neither.
Carol
But I truly believe that just from the testimonials I get from the people who buy milk and cream from us.
Jamie
If I make a point to drink, I’m not a big milk drinker, but if I make a point to get a glass of milk a day, I don’t get late afternoon, like, oh, I need a snack type thing.
Carol
Oh, that’s interesting.
Jamie
Yeah. I feel more I want to say content. That’s not the word they use.
Carol
Full.
Jamie
Yeah.
Carol
Well, before we move on to our next topic, we are going to have a short word from PECO Supply familyowned.
Jamie
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Carol
That’s Peteosupply.com.
Jamie
PECO Supply.
Carol
Okay, so we’ve discussed here a little bit about raw milk butter and how good it is, because we know we’re.
Jamie
Just biased a little bit.
Carol
Yes. In order to make raw butter, you need to find it if you do not have your own cow.
Jamie
Yeah.
Carol
You need to find a source for raw milk if this is the journey you’re going to take.
Jamie
Because I’m fortunate there are a few people in the area that sell it. Yes. But I have no idea how you go about finding somebody if you live, like in a town, like if you live in Wilmer.
Carol
Okay.
Jamie
How do you find besides words of mouth?
Carol
Okay, yeah, word of mouth is one way. If you know somebody who already drinks raw milk or buys raw milk, there is a website called Realm.com.
Jamie
Okay.
Carol
And it has a search on there and raw milk farmers are actually registered in there. And so you can just type in your zip code and it’ll give you within a certain radius all the farms that sell raw milk. And that’s sheep, goat, cow. I know there’s a camel dairy somewhere here in Minnesota, but I don’t know if they’re registered on there or if they sell raw milk. I do not know. But I believe there is a camel dairy somewhere.
Jamie
I’m like going. That is very intriguing.
Carol
Our farm is listed on there and it usually tells you what they sell. Not all raw milk dairies do cream. We do sell cream off of our farm. Not all of them do. So you might have to learn how to remove your own cream, separate your own cream. But still, you still got raw milk, and that’s the key.
Jamie
I mean, it’s as simple as I use a gravy ladle. I leave my milk set for well, actually, however, whenever somebody pulls out a half gallon of milk to drink, I’m like, oh, wait, let me get that cream. And so I just use a gravy ladle and scoop it out and put it in another jar. I mean, I’m not getting every last drop of cream, but I’m getting enough.
Carol
To use right, and so then once you’ve found your source of raw milk and cream, whether that be your own cow or the neighbors or some other farm that you trust sure you trust your farm.
Jamie
You say, Ask them their practices. How do they clean before they milk, how do they clean the utter and stuff like that.
Carol
They should be able to tell you all that stuff and show you if you want.
Jamie
And you say they should let you see their milk room and their milk parlor.
Carol
Yes, I totally think they should be very transparent, very transparent with how they do their animals. In fact, I got a call today on someone who was just happened to be passing through Minnesota asking if she could get milk from me, and she did. She had lots of questions on how we sanitize if we give tours, not that she wanted one. She just wanted to know if we did it and how we milked, what kind of cows I had, what I fed them, and if I used any if I vaccinated or I used any antibiotics. Of course, we don’t use antibiotics out here because we are certified organic, but there are vaccines you can give being certified organic. So that is a very good one to ask your farmers. Even if they’re organic, there’s a lot of stuff you can still give your animals. And if you’re anti vaccine, you might want to know that information. You got your milk or your cream, but we’ll talk about getting milk as a whole product, and now you got to get the cream off of there. So you just talked about yeah, I just ladled a ladle. And I do advise you to leave your milk sit. Do not move it. Do not shake it. You want to get that cream line. Don’t jiggle it, because you want that heavy cream that’s on top. And milk does separate into different creams. Your heaviest cream is on top, and then there’s a light cream in the center. Then I’ve read that there’s another layer in there right above the milk that people call coffee cream.
Jamie
But I use heavy cream in my oh, no. Yeah. And actually, I always just I’d made an iced coffee before we came out here, and I’m like, Where’s my iced coffee? It might be sitting on top of my car.
Carol
But anyway, so we use a cream separator out here. We have one from it’s a motor cich from Slavic Beauty. And I have found it, I found it on Amazon. That’s where I ordered our cream separator. And we’ve had our cream separator for two years and last month, I believe, I believe I think I got it in March. That thing runs daily here. It’s very rare.
Jamie
Oh, I suppose that saved you lots of time.
Carol
Oh, yes. In fact, before we got the cream separator, I rarely did anything with our cream. Personally, I don’t like skim milk, so I like whole milk. So we just drank it whole and I simply bought coffee creamer at the store.
Jamie
I find that is so funny.
Carol
But that is what we did until we got that separator. And that changed everything out here. We should have had that years ago. I found it in a you know, it was a refurbished unit and so I got it for about half price. It was worth every penny paid for itself in less than a month. If you don’t have more than one cow, it probably is not worth it. But I have many cows, so for us, definitely worth it. And there’s lots of cream separators out there.
Jamie
Okay. So it’s not like one brand has the market.
Carol
No. And they’re all over my mine happens to be electric. They do have hand ones. Stay away from anything that’s made in China. That comes from your husband too. The motors aren’t as good. They’re kind of a knockoff, cheap knockoff that is really expensive.
Jamie
Okay.
Carol
Yeah. Do your research on that. And so you need to separate your cream. Everything I read is that if you’re going to separate it manually like you do with a ladle or whatever, you really need to let that milk sit in your refrigerator for at least a day, two days. The more it’ll separate and the better your thick cream will be. Here because we have the separator, our milk comes up from the barn and it is separated immediately before it’s cooled. Before it’s even cooled, separated immediately. And then our cream is chilled. That’s how we do it. The pigs usually get the majority of our skim milk because we do gallons of milk. I could not make enough mozzarella cheese to use that up. So our pigs get most of that. And like I said before, I don’t like skim milk. We always have whole milk in our refrigerator.
Jamie
Technically though, because I want that cream because for current projects. But it still has a little bit of milk.
Carol
I was going to say you’re probably at that 2%. Yeah, probably equivalent of 2%.
Jamie
Yeah. But the whole milk is much better.
Carol
Yeah, I prefer it feels good on your palate.
Jamie
Yes. And you put a little chocolate powder in that. It does feel sinful. Then like oh yeah. This is like the store bought chocolate milk. Yes.
Carol
The next step you really need to decide is if you’re going to if you’re going to make sweet cream butter or cultured butter. We only make sweet cream butter here. Now, we’ve thought about doing cultured. I had one of my milk customers actually make some cultured butter and she shared it with me and I really didn’t care for it. But I’m not one who likes that tangy.
Jamie
Yeah, you don’t like sour cream. So yeah, I could see you not liking cultured butter.
Carol
So I don’t know a whole lot about making cultured butter, so we’re not going to talk about that. I’m just going to talk about sweet cream butter because that’s what I know. And maybe we’ll do cultured butter some other time. So once you have your cream separated from your milk and you’ve decided you’re going to make sweet cream butter, so you need to use it in the next few days, and some people collect it until they have enough.
Jamie
Even like I buy a gallon of milk for us to drink. A gallon of milk is not going to give you maybe a little over a pint.
Carol
Maybe. It all depends.
Jamie
Depends on which cow I get.
Carol
It all depends on time of year, time of year feed, which cow is being milked, whatever. I mean, there’s a lot of variables there. But I would say that if you’re making sweet cream butter, your cream should only maybe sit up to maybe seven days before it’s going to start to culture.
Jamie
I read a word and I liked it. It starts to evolve.
Carol
Evolve, yes.
Jamie
And so then you might end up.
Carol
In the cultured butter department.
Jamie
Yeah, I suppose that’s probably how you get it.
Carol
Yeah. Once you’ve got enough cream to make your butter, and you need to make your butter. So it’s really simple. All you need to do is you need to have some type of a churn, whether that be a jar, your KitchenAid mixer, your blender, your food processor, or an actual butter churn, which we use here. We use a milky butter churn. You have to decide how you’re going.
Jamie
To do it and how much money you want to put into it. Yeah, basically, I mean, a jar, any jar, an old spaghetti sauce jar will do.
Carol
The thing is with a jar is that besides having that tight fitting lid that I talked about earlier, you only fill the jar half full of cream.
Jamie
Oh, need the room for this because.
Carol
You needed to agitate. So that’s the most important thing to remember about doing the jar method is that you do not want to fill it too full because it won’t agitate correctly. And that is it. Well, I should say you do need to bring your milk up to a certain temperature. For us, 55 to 60 degree cream works best. Now, I’ve seen other people say they take it straight out of the refrigerator and use it. Some bring it to room temperature, whatever that is. In your house. So you got to kind of play around with it because I really think it makes a difference. Once again, the farm, it came from your cow. You know how your cream reacts, whatever.
Jamie
And it might your environment.
Carol
Yeah, it might take a little bit because if we don’t warm our cream the way we know it should be, it either takes longer to churn, sometimes it turns immediately, sometimes it turns really quick. And the thickness of your cream makes a huge difference too, as to how fast it will turn.
Jamie
Okay.
Carol
And I think the age of your cream makes a difference too.
Jamie
For us, your cream is always about the same age.
Carol
Yes. We try to do it within two to three days because if we do it the same day, we don’t get the butter yield that we do by leaving it. That’s just something we’ve discovered in the process of time. And we’ve tried super thick cream for butter. And it gets to be very hard to shape and use. The butter gets really hard with that really high butter fat. We actually turned our cream separator down a little bit to make our cream a little bit thinner because I think we end up with a better butter product. So it’s just something you have to learn. It’s just part of the learning curve or whatever. But I mean, for the most part, making butter is really quite simple.
Jamie
Oh, yeah. Now there’s the one trick. You told me if I wanted to use my KitchenAid, what do you want to do?
Carol
Oh, yes.
Jamie
Okay.
Carol
We talked about the jar and a blender comes with a lid. I did butter when we had a single milk cow daisy. I did butter in our we had a ninja mixer, and it actually had kind of like a paddle in it. And that worked. Really? That didn’t take any time at all to make butter in there. Can use a KitchenAid mixer. That’s very common.
Jamie
Videos and stuff.
Carol
So the biggest thing with a KitchenAid mixer is that it can make a real mess when it turns. When it actually turns when you get your butter and your buttermilk because it’s slopping around in there so fast that it will splatter everywhere. So I actually have a splatter guard on my mixer that came with it when I went my KitchenAid mixer. And you need to throw a towel over the top of that as well.
Jamie
Oh, even with the splatter guard?
Carol
Oh, yes. Because it’ll come out of every little crevice. Now, mine is a plastic, like, pour one. But I did see on Amazon they have actually like a silicone one that goes over the top. It almost seals your bowl. Now, I don’t know, I don’t have any experience with it, but I would think that would be a nice little investment.
Jamie
If you’re going to that’s how you’re.
Carol
Going to butter your butter. If you’re going to do. Butter in a KitchenAid mixer. And then, of course, the other thing is you can get yourself a churn and there’s a bazillion different types out there. You can get electric, you can get a hand crank. I mean, glass, metal. I don’t know if they sell wooden ones anymore, but I saw lots of them in my research from olden days. My dad talked about making butter on their dairy farm as a kid. And yeah, they did the whole plunger in the wooden barrel thingy or whatever. We on our farm, we have the Milky brand. It’s an FJ tenant, holds up to a gallon of cream.
Jamie
Cream. Oh, wow, that’s a lot of cream.
Carol
Yeah, that’s a lot of cream. I think we’ve done as little as a half gallon. But for us, if we’re going to go through the work, we’re going to put a gallon in there, we plug it in and it goes hand cranking. I’m at the age where that would.
Jamie
Be no, my shoulder would be yeah, my shoulder would be she’s making stretches, my shoulder.
Carol
But if you’re thinking you might not have electricity at some point, my turn won’t work.
Jamie
Yeah, or you have little kids that could sit and crank.
Carol
It’s kind of a personal choice on.
Jamie
That, money wise, because I’m sure an electric one is more expensive than a hand crank one, I’m sure.
Carol
Okay. The electric is three to $400.
Jamie
Budget is an issue.
Carol
Yes, that is about it. As far as making the butter. Now, after your butter has broke, and when I say it’s broke, I mean you’ve got a clump of butter and you’ve got a bunch of buttermilk in there. Now you’ve just made natural buttermilk, and that’s pretty valuable. Oh, yeah. Because you can use that anywhere. Well, in any recipe that requires milk, you can use buttermilk in it. That your milk from sweet cream butter is not cultured, though. And I don’t know how uncultured buttermilk works in a lot of recipes we have today, because most recipes call for a cultured buttermilk. So I don’t know how that would work. Any recipe I’ve tried our buttermilk in it has been a recipe that’s for fresh buttermilk, which is uncultured because my recipe calls for cultured buttermilk in my biscuits. And I haven’t tried our buttermilk in those biscuits. I haven’t, because I make cultured buttermilk.
Jamie
You make fresh cream buttermilk, you don’t make cultured buttermilk.
Carol
We get fresh cream buttermilk off of our butter. But I also make cultured buttermilk.
Jamie
Okay.
Carol
From whole milk, though. It’s not the same. It’s not the same. That’s how I make my cultured buttermilk. I have tried putting like a cultured buttermilk, using like, a cultured buttermilk from the store and putting it into our buttermilk to see if it will culture it.
Jamie
Okay.
Carol
And it does culture it, but it’s just a little on the weird side. I like these technical terms and I haven’t really had a chance to really play around with it yet to see if it really works just like a cultured buttermilk from the store.
Jamie
Well, baking wise, baking, baking, that type.
Carol
Of thing, I just haven’t gotten that.
Jamie
Far with it as though you have it.
Carol
You need another project, right? So you end up with butter, and you end up with buttermilk. The next thing you need to do is you need to wash your butter. And this is probably the most important, critical step in making butter. You have to wash your butter, and if you’re doing it by hand, can be kind of a little tedious process because you need to keep rinsing that butter. And most people just do it with their hands, and they just constantly rinse, rinse, rinse. There’s things called butter paddles that you can help squeeze out some of the buttermilk, and you just keep manipulating and manipulating it. When I did it by hand, I actually put gloves on and so I wouldn’t get all the greasiness all over my hands and just under the running water and just constantly shaping, pushing, prodding, whatever, trying to get it to run clear.
Jamie
Yeah. The few times I’ve done it, that was hardburn.
Carol
That is the most tedious chore, and it’s hard on my hands.
Jamie
Now, I don’t think I could do it at my age. I don’t have arthritis, but yet, if I overuse my hands, they’re stiff.
Carol
The next day, in comes our butter churn. Now, the milky brand butter churn that we have actually has a spout on the bottom, and it allows us to take out all of the buttermilk, cap it, and we can rinse our butter using the machine. Now, a lot of churns are not like that. Your glass churns aren’t like that. You have to dump it out. You have to dump everything and put it back in. But Rich, actually, I believe he rinses our butter for five minutes. He takes like, four cups, about a quarter of cool water, pours it in the churn, lets the churn do its thing, manipulate the butter and everything, empties it out, starts over, does this for about five minutes.
Jamie
Okay.
Carol
And our butter is and he just keeps going until it’s run clear. So it takes about four to five times of that rinsing. The way he does it with that churn, that is one of the questions we get all the time about our butter churn, is, does it do everything? And it literally it does separate the cream. It doesn’t separate the cream off the milk, but it does everything else for the butter. It rinses it for us. I mean, you still have to work it, but there’s no hands on there’s no hands on it. It churns it. It, then rinses it for us. And then if you’re adding salt, we also use the churned oh, to work and incorporate the salt. That’s about it for us. We weigh our butter, and then, according to the weight is how we add our salt.
Jamie
Okay.
Carol
And our salt, we do one teaspoon of salt per pound of butter. That seems to work for us. We do use redmond salt. That’s the only salt we use in our butter. You have to have a really fine salt. That’s the biggest thing. It has to be almost a powder that works the best because it dissolves and you don’t have crunchy little pieces. I’ve tried using like that’s with cheese, too.
Jamie
Do you use that with your cheese?
Carol
No, I do not, actually. I use a kosher salt with my cheese.
Jamie
Okay.
Carol
Cheese is a little bit better, but I don’t think you can use, like, a Himalayan salt. No, I did my first, but that’s.
Jamie
The one thing crunchy.
Carol
Yeah. There’s not enough in the butter to dissolve those bigger crystals. So you need to have something that’s extremely fine. And yeah, we use redmond salt. It we used to be called popcorn salt because it’s kind of like a powder. I don’t remember what it’s called now because they changed the name of it. That’s what we use. And then you need to do something with your butter. Now you’ve got it salted or unsalted, and now you need to package it somehow or another. Now, on our farm, we put it into quarter pound sticks, and so I weigh all the butter. Rich works, the paddles and the board, and he shapes our butter. So we make rolls so they’re like little logs, 4oz, which is one stick, half a cup. And he makes rolls for our salted, and he squares it up like the stuff from the store in the quarters and makes them little boxes, whatever, rectangles for our unsalted. So when I look in the freezer, I just have to visually, I know I don’t even have to read what I wrote on there. Yes. I don’t have to read my little labeling, and that is about it. I store mine in Ziploc bags. I put four in there, so I have £1 of butter. I’ve seen other people who use a parchment paper put their butter to store their butter in. They wrap it in parchment paper. You could probably use wax paper. I’ve seen people put it in plastic containers, tupperware tubs, whatever they got. Yeah, whatever you got. When we first started, I wrapped ours in Saran Wrap plastic wrap. That worked, too. Yeah, that works.
Jamie
Whatever.
Carol
And if you get all of the buttermilk out correctly, you should not have butter that goes rancid, because that’s the biggest thing that happens. If there’s buttermilk left in and our butter, we can leave it sit on the table. I leave it out.
Jamie
Oh, yeah, we do, too.
Carol
It does not bother me to leave it out. Well, we eat a lot of butter, so it doesn’t last very long.
Jamie
No. Yeah, I bet a stick goes by in three. Now, if I’ve made bread, it’s gone very quickly.
Carol
Yes.
Jamie
But yeah, I bet a stick doesn’t. My husband uses it every morning when he fries eggs. If I happen to fry eggs for myself, I use butter. I think I read it was like seven days that it would sit on the counter and not start to evolve. Yes, but yeah. Getting the buttermilk out is the biggest issue.
Carol
You need to make sure you have that water. The water is running clear before you decide to do anything. Take it any step further with shaping it, putting salt in it, whatever you want to make sure that that’s completely clean so you don’t end up with rancid butter. And if you’re questioning it, just make sure you put your butter back in the refrigerator. I believe that our raw cream butter has the same shelf life as pasteurized butter or butter from the store. I don’t have any problem. I haven’t had anything go rancid on me. It stores in the freezer for a really long time. I had some stuff that I’ve discovered at the bottom of the freezer, some unsalted butter, and that was still just as good. And I bet it was six months old, maybe eight months old, and it worked just fine.
Jamie
Everything that you’ve given me has lasted. Yeah, I haven’t had it that long, but I’m sure a month or so.
Carol
Yeah. I was going to say I don’t know that it would last for six months in the refrigerator just because it’s going to age, evolve, evolve, as you call it. It’s going to happen. It’s a raw product.
Jamie
Yeah, it’s raw product.
Carol
You’re not stopping it by putting it in the refrigerator. You’re just simply slowing it down where that’s like you’re stopping it.
Jamie
Yeah, that’s like any fermented product. It’s still fermenting in the fridge correct. And stuff. Because the few times that I did make butter, that was the issue. I did not get it rinsed well enough and it soured quickly on the kitchen counter.
Carol
I was going to say by hand, I never got our butter completely. It would change. And we’re like now, having that churn has really changed. Really changed it. Your buttermilk that comes off of your butter is a secondary product, basically. And now I’ve read where you need to use it in the next couple of days. But when I talk to our friend Kelsey, she says she lets it sit in the refrigerator till it gets really good and ripe. And then she uses it for pancakes and biscuits and that type of that’s how she does it. And I don’t know if that when she says that. If it means that it’s cultured a little bit for her in the refrigerator.
Jamie
I would assume so.
Carol
But if you leave it sitting there, you make sure you check it to make sure it’s still good.
Jamie
Use the senses God gave you your nose. If you dare taste it. If you can’t stomach it, don’t use it.
Carol
I have heard that fresh buttermilk does really well for like if you’re making liver, if you soak it in buttermilk, it helps take some of that livery taste. Yeah, I don’t know. We don’t really eat liver that way, so I don’t really know. But I’ve had a couple of people tell me that buttermilk can also be used as your culture. As your culture for just like you would use cheese Whey or Yogurt Whey or whatever to make your kimchi or sauerkraut sauerkraut, whatever.
Jamie
There are so many fermented vegetable combinations.
Carol
Yeah, that is another way you could use that up.
Jamie
One thing that you did I missed something. Just a minor fact. This is from Rawfarmsusa.com. One of their biggest thing was if leave your butter on your counter, but then when you go to use a clean silverware and if you don’t get enough the first time and you have to go back they even went so far as to get out another knife so they wouldn’t get food particles in it. Because if you’re not using it fast enough, it may develop mold. But their thing was it’s just like a cheese. If it does develop mold, just scrape it off and go on, throw the mold away and keep going. It’s still good.
Carol
Well, we use the same knife all day long on ours.
Jamie
Yeah, I think we do too. It might be a couple of days, actually. But I think you’re using yours long enough, fast enough that it’s not going to mold.
Carol
Most likely. Yeah.
Jamie
But if you happen to have somebody gifts you and you’re a single person in a single household, I could see it happening.
Carol
Yeah, that’s true. That’s very true. In our little search here, I found some other uses for butter. If you’re overwhelmed with butter and you don’t know what to do with all of it, but personally, I would want to consume it probably than not use it in most of these applications.
Jamie
Okay. I’m like, all right, I want to know.
Carol
Here’s a bunch of things that I found that you can actually use raw milk butter for skin care. Now, we talked a little bit about putting it on a wound, wound, that type of thing. But somebody was telling me, one of my customers was telling me that actually she has a daughter with eczema and she uses it on those areas of skin and it seems to help. I thought, well, that’s very interesting. I suppose if you’ve got all these antioxidants and all these good nutrients, just like with kefir, because you use kefir, every wound there is that butter would probably work the same way.
Jamie
Here’s a thought. Back when we were kids, if you got a burn, you were told to put butter on it.
Carol
That’s true.
Jamie
And then of course, by the 80s, they were telling you, don’t do that. All that does is keep it burning. So now it makes me think it’s like, oh, is that another thing that somebody decided, no, you’re going to use my product. And so we’re going to do a good campaign program, right?
Carol
Yeah. Jill Winger, she’s been on Facebook lately on a campaign against these big corporations and trying to make us think that we shouldn’t make stuff at home because it’s going to be bad for you or whatever, using your natural products and stuff.
Jamie
Oh, I’ll have to go delve into it.
Carol
You have to take it. She’s really on a kick right now with that. And it’s very interesting to see what she’s come up with.
Jamie
What she’s doing?
Carol
She’s doing butter also naturally desticks things, meaning there are natural oils in butter that are perfect for combating any and all things sticky. If you have been, say, doing craft projects and you’ve got glue all over your fingers, put some butter on it first and then wash your hands with soap and water. It’s supposed to take that residue off. I’m going to have to try this little trick because when I take labels off of my glass jars, my spaghetti sauce, whatever, pickles, whatever I’ve bought, I’ve put olive oil on mine to take that residue off. I’m going to try butter because I’ve got lots of butter, I have to buy olive oil. I don’t have to buy butter. I’m going to try that and see if that works. Because olive oil works really well. It takes that completely off of there. And so that was something. I also read that it makes an excellent gum remover from your hair. So those of you have little kids oh, yeah.
Jamie
As a hairdresser, I used to tell her, peanut butter, peanut butter works.
Carol
But they say butter works as well. So if you’ve got lots of butter, try that. It comes out it’s better than cutting.
Jamie
A hunk out of somebody’s hair.
Carol
Yeah, it comes out pain free is what I’m told. It will also remove tree SAP from your car.
Jamie
Let’s go smear.
Carol
It said to take a soft cloth with some butter on it, put it wherever the sappy parts are and rub it on there. And then come back and you wipe that off and then come back and wash it with soap and water and the SAP will be gone. Now, I do this putting butter on a knife before you’re going to cut something sticky, such as taffy, marshmallows, those things, I do that. So that is something that I do to make the knife slide through my items better. Also, butter also works as a WD 40 substitute if you don’t have any. It also said that it works well on cast iron to make it shiny, which makes sense to me. You got to grease them anyway, right.
Jamie
I can see your house where butter you have an abundance of butter. But in my house, where butter is a gift from you, it’s treasured in my house. But I have much more lard, so I use lard for that.
Carol
You can also use it to shine up your leather items. It has amino acids in it which protects it from ruining your leather is what I was reading. And here’s one. You can put butter on the edge of your cut cheese to keep it, to seal it so that it doesn’t dry out or get mold on it.
Jamie
That makes sense because I think I’ve read that, seen it in videos where if you’re going to put a going to bandage, what they call bandage your cheese, is that you use cheesecloth and an oil of some sort. And I could see using butter, it would take a lot of butter. I think I did watch a video where they used butter and they were on a dairy and so they had their own butter like you. And so they had abundance of butter.
Carol
I thought even for store bought cheese, when you cut open a block or whatever and just put on that cut edge and you can also put it on the cut edge of an onion before if you cut up an onion, cut it in half or whatever and put it on the cut edge. And then put it in plastic wrap and put it in your refrigerator. It’ll help keep that from drying out. Hadn’t heard that one before. And onions and butter are pretty good when they’re in the frying pan. Adding butter to your boiling water before you cook pasta, okay. It suppresses it from boiling over.
Jamie
Oh, I hear I was thinking for it wouldn’t stick together.
Carol
This is what this said. I don’t know. See, I’ve heard that too about so that it doesn’t stick. You put some oil in there, but then people say then your sauce doesn’t stick. Yeah, I would assume that the butter is going to react the same way, but it was just another personal preference. And then of course, if you have a stuck ring on your hand butter, it makes a very nice lubricant to remove a ring if you need to. And it also removes the fish smell from your hands. Supposed to put it on your hands first and then wash with soap and water and your fishy smell will be gone. I wouldn’t know for sure on that one. You can make your own coffee creamer. I had talked earlier about how we had raw milk here, but we didn’t utilize the cream for our coffee we bought at Starbucks. You can actually make your own coffee creamer.
Jamie
So in the keto world, low carb world, you can take and put a tablespoon of butter in your coffee in place of creamer. I can’t remember they have a name for it.
Carol
Yeah, I know, I know what you’re talking about too. Butter is basically a moisturizer type thing and so people put it on their skin. You can use it as a lip balm. I’ve heard that you can put it on your cuticles, help with dry skin on your hands. Yeah, I know. I’m like, I could use them right now.
Jamie
Yeah. So those are manicures.
Carol
Yeah, those are just a few things you can use besides baking and everything. And raw milk butter can be used in place of store bought butter and just about any recipe.
Jamie
Oh, yeah. I sit and say, oh, that’s just a given. Yeah, but it’s probably not.
Carol
It’s special, but you can still use it just as you would utilize your store bought and butter your pasteurized butter. Your pasteurized butter. It works just as well. I haven’t had to do anything that alter any recipe. No. When I make cookies or bars or pie crust, whatever, yeah, my bread, I.
Jamie
Just throw it in my bread.
Carol
It in my bread and it works just exactly the same. It’s just that it’s more nutrient dense for you and probably more health.
Jamie
I always just think it tastes better.
Carol
It tastes better. It’s healthier for you. I highly recommend it’s not hard to do. Takes a little time. Takes a little time. But if you don’t have time, sweet.
Jamie
Talk somebody and doing it for you.
Carol
If you’ve ever had raw milk butter, you will not go back to storebought.
Jamie
No, it’s hard.
Carol
Yeah, you might go back for baking, but you’re not going to go for your table.
Jamie
But actually, I still have some storebought stuff in the freezer, but I used some of it the other day and I’m like, oh, I need to use this up. It’s starting to it’s been in there in years and I’m starting to taste it now. So I was like, oh, I need to because I probably have like probably £6 left in there. And it’s like, yeah, I need to pull that out and use some of it in my baking or something cooking, but not on my bread.
Carol
But not on your bread. On your homemade bread. Can’t beat fresh butter on that. So to recap and make butter, you need to find a source for milk and cream, whether that be your own cow or from another farm. Raw milk. You then separate your milk and cream. You let it age for a day or two, preferably. You don’t have to, but preferably bring it to and you’re chilling it at that time. Chilling it. Don’t leave it sitting on the counter. You’re going to make something else. We’re making sweet cream butter here. And then you bring it up to the temperature that you need. Ours happens to be 55 to 60 degrees. You put it in your churn, whether that be the jar jar mixer, blender, actual churn and you churn your butter. Then you need to make sure once it breaks, you want to take your buttermilk off of it and put that aside for another project. And you want to rinse your butter until it runs clear. The water must run clear before you’re done. Whether you do it in the churn or you do it by hand, the water must run clear so you don’t end up with a rancid product. And then you salt it, UNSALT it, shape it, whatever you’re going to do with it, put it in the containers that you want and it goes into the refrigerator or into the freezer. And it is as simple as that. It does take a little bit of time. So I’d like to thank you for tuning in today and listening to us talk about making raw milk butter all the way from cow to butter. There we are. There’s our process. Yum, yum. We’d like to give a special thank you to PeteCoSupply.com for sponsoring our podcast.
Jamie
So until next time, put some keeper on it.
Outro
Thank you for listening to The Homestead Podcast’s latest episode. Your hosts, Carol Radtke and Jamie Kappes, are 2 Gals Homesteading. To learn more, go to 2galshomesteading.com or the 2galshomesteading Facebook page at facebook.com/2galshomesteading. Editing, audio production, and marketing of The Homestead Podcast is the responsibility of MediaTrendsX. The Homestead Podcast is an audio product of MediaTrendsX, a limited liability company based in Minnesota, USA.
