Making Homemade Butter With Kids | Little House on the Prairie (2024)

FAQs

How to make butter for kids experiment? ›

Always buy heavy cream or whipping cream for churning butter. Any brand will do. You need the higher fat content. Heavy cream is approximately 40% butterfat and 60% milk solids and water.

They would milk the family's cow and let the milk sit in a shallow pan overnight in order for the cream to rise to the top. The next morning they skim the cream layer with a wooden ladle and leave it out to sour. The cream was them poured into the butter churn (see right).

Butter has long been made by shaking a container of cream. How does this work? To make butter from cream, the cream is shaken so that the fat particles get shaken out of position and clump together with other fat particles.

The yellowish or whitish solid of fat, water, and inorganic salts that is obtained by churning cream or whole milk is called butter. Although most butter is made from cow's milk, in some countries the milk of other animals is used to make the product.

Heavy cream, whipping cream, or heavy whipping cream are all suitable choices for making homemade butter. Heavy cream, with the highest percentage of butterfat, will yield the most butter; lower-fat whipping cream will yield less.

The ideal temperature for churning butter is around 60-65 F. If the cream is too cold, it is harder for the fat globules to stick together, and if it is too warm the butter will be a little too soft and gloopy. Pour the cream into the glass jar of the churn. Screw on lid.

With the old fashioned butter barrels, the women would simply move a wooden dowel up and down inside the barrel. Agitating the cream causes the buttermilk to separate from the fat solids and you will eventually end up with buttermilk and fresh churned butter. You will want to try and churn at a consistent pace.

How long does homemade butter last? Homemade butter has a shelf life of up to 2 – 3 weeks when kept in the fridge. You can also keep your homemade butter in the freezer for up to 9 months.

You are on the home-streach to getting butter. The harder and faster you shake, the quicker the cream is going to break. When you begin to hear liquid sloshing around in the jar again, you're almost done. Just shake a little bit longer to make sure it's all complete.

How long to shake homemade butter? ›

Shake the jar until butter forms. This could take between five to 20 minutes. Once you have shaken the jar enough, the liquid will suddenly separate from the butter. The butter will be a pale yellow lump, and the liquid will be milky.

Cream is a mixture. It is made of tiny drops of water mixed with fat droplets and protein. Shaking the cream in the jar makes the fat droplets stick together, forming butter. The liquid part has the protein and that is the buttermilk.

During churning, “phase inversion” is taking place. Cream is being transformed from an oil-in-water emulsion to butter, a water-in-oil emulsion. The cream is churned to encourage the fat globules to coalesce, aggregate, come together, and form solid butter granules/clumps.

Stir butter into baby's food, such as mashed vegetables or porridge, or try cooking age-appropriate fruits or vegetables with butter. At this age, you can also spread butter thinly on other age-appropriate foods, such as a strip of toast or half a toasted bagel.