Windfall

What to do when your SO comes home with a crate full of marked-out cream from the local coffee shop?

You introduce it to your little friend the buttermilk (lucky I had some on hand)

And make cultured butter!

Cultured butter is like regular butter but with FLAVOR. Instead of just tasting like delicious fat, it tastes like deliciouser fat. Seriously, if you've never had it, find some and try it (fancy food stores will have it), or make your own.

Dan came home at 10pm with a literal crate full of marked-out heavy cream, so after boggling at this surplus of dairy I poured a quart of it into a mixing bowl and added some buttermilk (about 1/2 cup) and left it out overnight with a cover on it.

This is what it looked like at noon the next day:

It tasted kind of weird when I tried it.

I then whipped it until it held stiff peaks

And then I turned the mixer speed to LOW because when whipped cream turns into butter it goes GLOP and seizes up and if your mixer is going too fast it will throw buttermilk everywhere.

This is what you want.

Mmmm, curdly.

I drained off the liquid into another bowl. This is true buttermilk, the liquid left over from churning butter. Modern-day buttermilk from the store is more like a pourable yogurt.

I still haven't decided what to do with the liquid.

What I was left with:

Tastes more like butter at this point.

You're supposed to wash the butter until the water runs clear. This gets rid of residual milk proteins that might spoil and turn the butter rancid. Most recipes say to knead it by hand under running water, but I like technology so I ran the mixer with some water poured in with the butter.

I decided to salt this batch as insurance against rancidity (salt inhibits spoilage somewhat), so I threw in a tablespoon of kosher salt as the water/butter mixture was churning.

After several water changes, and a mixing paddle change (the butter was getting stuck inside the wire whisk head):

I drained the last of the water and whipped the butter up, then stuffed it into an empty yogurt tub:

Dan got the residual butter off the beater and he was very, very happy.

Just seven more jugs to go!