Actually it's just butter - had a Martha Stewart / Home on the Farm moment and made butter this weekend. Honestly, not sure what Frontier women did before the heavy duty KitchenAid mixer.Like most things food related, making butter is about as simple as feeding Winston and Obie in the morning. I'll post the recipe later, but basically you take heavy whipping cream, and beat the crap out of it. You don't really need to watch it, but if you do . . . over the passing 15 minutes, you'll see it change from cream to whipped cream to curdled cream to the final mixture of half butter and half buttermilk.
You don't need to even time it, because when it's done, it makes this huge ka-chunka ka-chunka sound that can scare dogs and be heard from across a house. After draining out the buttermilk in a sieve, I did go ahead and knead with a dough hook and a little water to make it easier to work with and remove the excess buttermilk - but that was about it. You can salt it for more taste and preservation, but I'm trying the baseline right now.
Since the source of the cream was my local grocery store, I think the next time I do it, I'm going to go upscale and get it straight from a local cow. With 6 cups of cream, I ended up with about 3 cups of buttermilk and 3 cups of butter. I'll try a couple of recipes with it, but last night's buttermilk biscuits were pretty good.
