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Food and Diet Kids Craft and Fun Messy Play Trying to Live a Sustainable Life

Making Butter with kids……. mmmmm homemade butter

So “yes” it is possible and even quite fun to make delicious butter at home with your kids.  It’s a brilliant way to start teaching your young children about science too.

Now excuse the quality of the photographs, I hate the i-phone picture quality and I had very greasy hands and did not want to ruin my phone in the process.

So, what do you need?

Well I’ll tell you:

Some double (or in US heavy) cream

a jar with a lid (yes you can user a mixer but this way you get a workout too and it’s so much more involved)

some salt (to taste) or not if you’re like husband

muslin (yes you can reuse a very very clean one you had for your babies) or a sieve but believe me from experience the muslin in a better and cleaner option

another jar (to keep your butter milk in)

LET US BEGIN…………

Take your cream and pour in into your clean jar (we measured ours out as our recipe told us to, really you don’t need to do this which is why I have given no quantities)

Now shake, shake as if you’ve never shaken before.  Give it to your children to shake, just keep on going…..

Now after a while as well as suffering from fatigue you will begin to notice a change, there will no longer be a sloshing sound as you shake… at this point you can check it but I would keep going, it takes a lot longer than some recipes would have you believe to get it to a butter like consistency.

 

Eventually you will have something that looks like thick white butter.  Now what you have to do is to pour any remaining liquid into your other jar (this is buttermilk and has a variety of other uses).

Then put your remaining white mess into a muslin or a sieve and squeeze out the remaining liquid into the jar (now with a tiny bit of buttermilk in it).  Now pour freezing cold (or very cold) water over the white mess and squeeze it all out into the jar again.

Keep doing this until the liquid starts to run clear (we filed up two large jars doing this)

Remember the by-product is buttermilk and very useful

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Now keep squeezing, your white mess will  go through a phase where you wonder what the hell you’ve done.  It will look like white lumpy water (don’t worry this is a good thing).

 

Eventually when all the liquid has been squeezed out you will be left with lovely yellow butter.  At this stage add salt to taste and mix it in, put in the fridge ready to spread when you want it!

 

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