butter

This summer I have been able to make couple of my long-time dreams come true. First, I have a tent (small cone) for 2 to sleep in events. Second, now I have a fireplace in backyard where I can actually cook on open fire. Third I have a churn (churns).

Making my own butter with a churn has been a long-time dream. I have been looking for the right churn for some time. Finally asking around I found a person from Denmark who was able to sell me churns. Now after a busy spring and after vacation I took my churn and made butter for the first time. It was really easy to do!

First I soaked the churn in hot water for some hours.

I used only cream this time for making the butter. Old traditional Finnish and European way is to make butter from cultured (soured) cream. That can be done easily adding for example 1 tablespoon of cultured milk (piimä) or Nordic sour cream (kermaviili) to 1 liter of cream and let the cream rest in freezer for a day. It is matter of taste how people like their butter. Me, I prefer my butter either non cultured or if then just a little bit cultured. If the butter goes too sour it tastes stale.

Then churning…

After 30 minutes it looked like this:

Now the butter was ready for to scoop from the bottom of the churn. Save the churn buttermilk for making bread, it is very tasty.

After that it was time to wash the butter carefully with cold water. It is good to strain and wash away the churn buttermilk as carefully as possible. That way the butter stays fresh longer.

When the washing is done, salt the butter with 1 teaspoon of salt. Put it in a bowl and storage in the fridge.

The butter will keep from couple days to a week. After couple of days, my butter still smells and tastes fresh and good.

And finally couple pictures and videos from second week of June when our group went to Middelaldercentret, Nykobing Falster with friends. It was a textile week but textile makers needed to eat too.