There are a few occasions when you may be interested in making butter from scratch: at a brunch party with guests whom you really want to impress; on mother's day, father's day, or an anniversary, when you really want the person you're cooking for to know how much you love them. Or maybe you just want a fun (and easy) kitchen science project, because you're cooped up indoors with no ready-made butter—but plenty of cream—and you really need some cinnamon toast.
In any of these instances, the food processor is your best friend. It's how to make butter in the cleanest, most efficient way. And it gives you the opportunity to easily turn plain butter into flavored compound butter. Here's how to do it:
1. Pour cream into a food processor
Buy the highest quality cream you can find—"the less pasteurized the better," says Anna Stockwell. "Unpasteurized cream turns into butter more quickly, and tastes a lot better." If you can't find unpasteurized cream, you can add 1 tablespoon of crème fraîche to the cream, which will give the finished butter a flavor similar to cultured butter. How much you use will depend on the size of your food processor—you want to add enough cream so that it rises above the blade, but doesn't reach above the halfway mark. (We used 2 cups of cream in an 11-cup food processor, which will yield about 1 cup of butter.)
2. Whip the cream
Turn the food processor on and let it whir on moderate speed until the butter solids start to separate from the liquid, 4 to 7 minutes. You'll notice butter solids forming in clumps after the cream passes the whipped cream stage.
3. Pour out the buttermilk
That liquid that separated from the butter—that's buttermilk! But it's real, old-fashioned buttermilk, not the kind of buttermilk that's sold in most stores today which is typically just milk with a culture added to it (similar to yogurt). Carefully pour it out of the food processor and use it to make biscuits, cornbread, a smoothie (it's very high in protein), or soup.
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4. Rinse the butter
Add cold water to the food processor and swish it around, but don't run the machine. This step is important because it removes excess proteins from the butter which could cause it to go rancid more quickly if left in. Keep rinsing and dumping out the liquid (there's no reason to keep the rinsing liquid) until the rinse runs clear.
5. Flavor the butter
If you'd like—and why wouldn't you like?—now's the time to add flavoring to your butter. You could just add salt—or you could go savory with garlic and herbs, or sweet with cinnamon, sugar, and orange zest. Add your chosen ingredients to the processor and pulse to incorporate. (Keep an eye on it—you don't want to incorporate the ingredients too much.)
