What's For Dinner Wednesday--Homemade Butter

Yeah, that's right.  I ate butter for dinner.

Well, on pieces of bread. 

And it was pretty decent.  Creamy.  Just like the butter you made when you were in elementary school.  And it was pretty cool to see it all come together.  And SO easy.

But why?

Well, I want to make some bread tomorrow that needs buttermilk and I didn't want to go to the store just for buttermilk so I read where you can make buttermilk by making butter and I happened to have a quart of whipping cream in my fridge...

Don't ask...

So I dumped the whipping cream in the Kitchen Aid and turned it on.  I was a little worried at some point because I didn't think it would work and then I'd be known as the person who screwed up homemade butter, but it went from being liquidy to frothy to lumpy and then back to liquidy with lumps in it.  And that was really cool to watch because it was almost instantaneous. 

Once it became lumpy I mixed it a few minutes longer than drained the liquid (the buttermilk) out in a colander.  I rinsed the butter with cold water and rinsed that.  Then I squeezed (squoze?) more liquid out by smashing the glob of butter with a spatula.  Lastly, I spun it around in the mixer for a few more minutes with some salt.

The consensus?  It was pretty good, though it's not very cost effective.  The whipping cream was $2.67 and a pound of butter is $2.78.  So will I be completely switching over to homemade butter any time soon?  Probably not.  However, it was tasty on this sourdough bread that was SO good AND only 50 calories per slice. 

And it's what I made for my dinner.  Everyone else had spaghetti.