This weekend I decided to try my hand at butter making. The whole experience was pretty educational. I’d recommend giving it a try if you have a stand mixer and are looking for an easy recipe that will make you feel like you know something. Or you can just look at these pictures and pretend.

Start by pouring a pint or two (I used two) of cream into the bowl of your stand mixer, with the whisk attachment, start whipping the cream on a low-ish setting. Once the cream gets frothy enough to stop splashing, bump the speed up to high. If you wanted to make whipped cream, you’d stop the mixer when the cream’s consistency was somewhere between the picture on the left and the picture on the right – fluffy but not stiff.

But we aren’t making whipped cream, we’re making butter. So keep mixing.

After a few minutes of sustained, high-speed mixing the buttermilk will start to separate from the butter. Turn the mixer back to low to keep the buttermilk from splashing out of the bowl. When the butter and buttermilk look like the pictures below, pour everything into a colander and let the milk drain away. Run the butter curds (or whatever they’re called) under cold water until the water runs clear – this will help your butter last longer. At this point, I packed the butter into a ball and wrapped it in paper towels to allow it to drain further. I don’t like water in my butter.

Now’s the time to contemplate flavorings. I had my heart set on making truffle butter, so I grated a truffle. You could add salt, garlic, fresh herbs, pepper, or spices to your butter. You could even add sugar if you want. It’s butter, so whatever you add is going to taste good. Go nuts.

Hindsight being 20/20 I should have used two truffles in my truffle butter. At eight bucks a pop, I couldn’t even fathom using more than one, but the truffles were too mild to adequately flavor the amount of butter I made. Lesson learned. Next time I will look for truffle oil or fresh truffles to add to the mix as well.

All that’s left to do at this point is put some of your fancy homemade butter on some fancy homemade bread and eat it.

OR you could do this:

homemade truffle butter + Parmesan cheese + homemade bread + broiler = good food.

Put that homemade butter in a cute little jar and stash it in the fridge for up to a week or in the freezer for up to a month. Then pat yourself on the back fancypants, you just made butter from scratch.