"Butter is just a little stick of smiles and happiness."

After finding out that Snowville Creamery, the best Ohio milk you can buy (in my humble, but so far unchallenged opinion) sold whipping cream, and that said whipping cream was 38% butterfat and very suitable for butter making.  The logical conclusion was...let's make our own butter.  I checked YouTube and sure enough, we can use our new KitchenAid mixer to do it in 10-20 minutes.  So...we did it!

Here is the part in the post that there should be a video of our butter making, but unfortunately my computer is not cooperating with the video editing.  I got Lynette a new video camera for Christmas, and we're still figuring out the video editing.  We've got a few long clips that need bits pulled out of them and merged into one fairly short and concise video.  It may be the old computer, the software, or just my lack of video editing knowledge, but I'll get the hang of it.  I'll try to get it up soon, if not on the blog, it'll definitely be on my YouTube channel.

Here are the basics though.  The whipping cream comes in 1/2 gallon container.  Since this was our first time, we didn't want to use all of it (just in case we did something wrong the first time) so we used about half; therefore 1/4 of a gallon. (Yes, that's some fractional division.)  From the half gallon we got just shy of 1 lb. of butter and right at 2 cups of buttermilk:

This is really the best thing since sliced bread (which we are also baking tonight)!  We didn't look while at the store, but we did some searching around online for the prices of 1 lb. of organic butter and came up with a range of $4-7.  The half gallon of whipping cream was $8.99 of which we used roughly half so that was $4.50 worth which not only put us at the low end of that organic range for a pound of butter, but also gave us some buttermilk for some delicious pancakes (or whatever else) tomorrow morning.  All of this, coupled with the fact that no matter how much we spent on organic butter at the store, I think it's very unlikely that quality-wise it will compare to this butter, made with Snowville cream.  Just the quality of the milk stands against anything else in the coolers, but the fact that they are a local, Ohio dairy is all the better.

I find it hard to imagine us ever buying butter from a store again.  We'll probably be buying a lot more of Snowville's whipping cream though!