Tuesday 5 August 2008

Summer holiday game No. 3: Butter.

Back to the kids for this one. This is perfect for a rainy day and is something I used to do with my mum when I was a little girl. It's a game with something to eat at the end. Perfect.

1. Get some lovely double cream. We use Bethesda cream from a local farm which has Ayrshire cattle.

2. Make sure the cream isn't too cold; it needs to have been out of the fridge for at least half an hour. Put it into a jar - an old honey jar is ideal - then shake...

3. After a while - anything from ten minutes to half an hour - the noise in the jar will change from a sort of fluffy noise (sorry, difficult to describe) to a sloshing noise.

4. Open the jar and look inside: butter! The liquid is buttermilk. Pour that off into a jug and use to make pancakes, scones or (our favourite) soda bread.

5. Put cold water straight from the tap into the jar, drain and repeat until the water runs clear. This is to wash out any remaining buttermilk.

6. Put the butter onto a board and pat with a suitable implement - plastic or wooden spatulas are ideal - to squeeze out excess water and buttermilk.

7. Finished! You have a nice little pot of fresh butter. Add salt to taste and spread on some lovely crusty bread. Yum!

5 comments:

  1. Great memories of making butter when I was small,my gran used to put the cream in a jar and my sister and I use to roll it back and forth across the floor to each other.
    What a fun thing to do on a wet day.
    Blossom

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  2. I remember doing this at school with a class, using two different types of milk. The full cream children were amazed. The half cream made a very little butter, but it was all eaten with relish!

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  3. This is worth a try, will get some organic double cream from our milkman, it's so thick we'll already be half way there! Thanks for the idea!

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  4. Oh wow, that is so clever......
    ha, makes me think of the cream that wouldn't go thick when you came to tea.....jx

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  5. That brings back memories - I used to make butter like that with my boys when they were little. Great fun!

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