One a day, plus iron

Everyone right now go buy a pint of heavy cream and whip it until it breaks and makes butter. (Use a mixer.) This is educational AND fun.

The cream whips like for normal for whipped cream. Just keep beating it until it breaks. The texture gets all grainy and wrong and it's freaking sudden and magical. Very cool stuff, that. This is the educational part -- if you learn what cream looks like just before it breaks, you will never unintentionally make butter when what you really wanted was whipped cream.

Once the whipped cream has broken, keep beating it until it looks like scrambled eggs. (The jersey cow cream I am working with is very yellow. It's so yellow that it looks fake, like I dyed it.) It is not done when it looks like whipped butter for making cookies or something. Keep beating it until it looks like dry scrambled eggs, all clumpy.

Stop beating a minute and mash the butter with a spatula. Does white liquid ooze out? If yes, you're pretty good. If not, beat another couple of minutes and try again. Once you have the white liquid thing going on, mash and fold and re-mash the butter. Drain off white liquid (buttermilk, can be saved for baking) and repeat the mash-n-fold thing. Beat a little more, maybe. You want the white liquid to drain out. It's bad for the butter.

Then, put it in the fridge to chill again (if doing this in spring/summer when it's warm). After it's cold again, put the butter bowl under cold (COLD) water and fold/mash the butter until the water runs clear. Finally, remove bowl from water and fold/mash the butter again until the water is all drained out. Now you're ready to salt, mold, and chill your butter. Salt is not very much. Molds are to make your butter prettier. I skipped that step. Chill, well, the fridge, yo. Eat within the week.

This is really kind of nifty. It's amazingly nifty.

The butter, which has excellent mouth feel and dissolves readily and easily at mouth temperature and looks like it would be amazing to cook with -- it tastes like cow. It really reminds me of the way that raw milk tastes like cow. (Bought milk, shelf-stable organic or regular grocery store milk (whole fat, skim, two percent, or whatever) or calcium-enhanced does NOT taste of cow like raw milk does. You do not know what "cow" tastes like until you've had raw milk from a cow. If you've ever hand-milked a cow and gotten cow milk all over your hands, "cow" tastes like your hands smell after that.) The home-made butter is stickier than "real" butter, the bought kind, probably because it contains less water.

The home-made butter is bright yellow, so yellow that it looks like oleo instead of like real butter. I swear, it's the same color as fucking Parkay. I didn't put food coloring in it. This is what came out of the thrice-damned cow. Really. I am going to take a picture here so that you can all see what it looks like compared to storebought butter. It looks totally not-real in color. (I'll need daylight for that, so probably tomorrow.)

Now, this is butter made from a real cow that goes outside and eats actual grass and stuff. It is not a cow on super-quality pasture or a cow eating a scientifically-approved diet of sileage, alfalfa hay, and grain. It is a cow that, in the summertime, wears a fifteen-foot chain so that she can be tied to large pieces of immobile machinery across the road where the grass and weeds grow tall. (This does not particularly upset the cow. She's used to it and she has a water barrel and gets relocated twice a day to fresh grass/weeds.) She also gets a fair amount of grain twice daily when she is milked, but so do "real" cows in pro dairy operations.

My question here is how come the butter made from industrially-farmed dairy cows is so pale and not-yellow? Don't those cows go outside? Don't they get to eat actual living plants? What's the deal here that the pros can't have cows that make yellow butter like the yellow butter that comes from Horns, a cow who is currently chained to a rusty manure spreader with a flat tire?