How to Make Homemade Cultured Butter – Three Different Ways

The perfect experiment to involve your kids. The difference between butter and cultured butter means the enzymes have not been completely destroyed by ultra pasteurization. Most milks you will find at the grocery store are ultra pasteurized. This in itself is not a bad thing. Its for the mass population safety.

With that said, we are going to make some excellent butter using ultra pasteurized whole milk as well. This is what most people will be able to find at the grocery store. Spoiler alert, the butter turns out almost as good as the cultured butter.

The reason I brought up involving your kids is the process of converting whole milk whipping cream into to butter is a great culinary experience. The separation of milk fat from the buttermilk takes around 12-15 minutes. But what is most interesting is there comes a point where your thinking, did I do something wrong, why hasn’t it turned into butter yet. Then all of a sudden the buttermilk pulls away from the milk fat. At this point you pretty much have butter. You still have work to do to make sure the butter tastes good and will store in the refrigerator.

Making cultured butter you have two options.

1. Mixing the cultured heavy whipping cream with kefir and move forward with the standard steps on the recipe card below to make butter.
2. Mixing the cultured heavy whipping cream with kefir, yet placing it into a glass vase or preferred container and cover it with cheesecloth, and store in the back of your refrigerator for 3 to 4 days. This process allows the probiotics/live cultures in the milk to ferment. This will enhance the flavor profile of your butter.

I mentioned using Kefir, so, what is that?

what is kefir?

is a fermented milk drink similar to a thin yogurt that is made from kefir grains. Traditional kefir is fermented at ambient temperatures, generally overnight. Fermentation of the lactose yields a sour, carbonated, with a consistency and taste similar to drinkable yogurt.

Homemade Whole Milk Heavy Whipping Cream Butter

We are going to be using 3 cups of whole milk heavy cream, but that’s not it. You could just use the 4 cups of heavy cream plus one tsp of kosher salt. But here at Butter-n-Thyme we bring the flavor, so we are adding another cool ingredient simple to Kefir but easy as pie to find. The ingredient is 1 cup of sour cream. The sour cream isn’t ultra pasteurized and rounds out the flavor you would come to expect and want in high quality butter.

Traditional Old School Method for Making Butter

Take a jar with a lid, add heavy cream and some salt, but do not fill all the way to the top. You need room for the heavy cream to be shaken. Then shake, shake, shake until your arm falls off. The butter fat will separate after while. This is labor intensive, yet a rewarding culinary experience.