I’ve never felt inclined to make butter myself. Yet I LOVE me some raw butter and as of late it’s been pretty hard to come by… and it so good for you.

The most healthful raw butter is a springtime commodity in the milking world.

Cows fed on rapidly growing spring grass produce milk that contains high levels of beta carotene and five times the amount of CLA, an essential fatty acid that has a strong anti-cancer properties. 

The beta-carotene in grass-fed raw dairy is most evident in butter that is a rich deep yellow color.  Grain-fed cows produce a butter that looks white.

Some of you also know that raw butter is a nutritional powerhouse according to Weston A. Price and his work, it is a source of “Factor X”. The “Price Factor X”  (now believed to be vitamin K₂) is only found in raw grass-fed milk butterfat, fish eggs, and the organs and fats of animals. It is how you can heal cavities with nutrition.

Our raw butter source has always been an Amish farmer, the same one we get our pork from. Our Amish farmer knows to make loads of butter in the spring, in fact, he only makes it in the spring! He then freezes it and sells it off to those interested in it. Sadly, he has been out of butter since the fall. Gasp!

We are swimming in raw milk right now because I’ve started a dairy detox to see if it helps Grayson’s newly developed symptoms and Everly is possibly reacting to dairy also. However, we have a gallon of raw milk coming to us each week via our cow share… so I’m exploring dairy preservation techniques!

We are making greek yogurt with the raw milk but are still swimming in it so I gave butter making a try this week. Butter is made from the cream that sits at the top of your raw, undisturbed milk. Skimming cream is easy and doesn’t require any fancy equipment! Keep your milk in a wide mouthed container and when you see the cream separated at the top (it will separate in the fridge or on the counter if it is undisturbed) just use a ladle and scoop the cream off the top.

Put your skimmed cream in a food processor. You can also try a blender or mixer. I started out trying my experiment in a blender and wasn’t too impressed and I hear the mixer can result in a messy process.

Return the butter solids to your bowl and press the chunks together with a wooden spoon, you’ll notice more liquid coming from the solids, more buttermilk. Pour off the liquid periodically. Keep doing this until your butter is liquid free.

Some folks say you should ice wash the butter next, so it keeps longer. I didn’t do this with mine. I’m not concerned will how long it will keep. We eat raw butter like mad!

Now you can enjoy your fresh raw butter or you can wrap it and freeze it for later use. Pretty easy huh?

About that buttermilk… It’s not at all waste! Sure you can use it in recipes that call for buttermilk but you can also use it for anything that calls for plain ole milk. I tried it with this basic pancake recipe and they didn’t taste any different.

So there you have it, homemade butter making is easy and not really all that wasteful. Plus, it’s a great way to stock up on raw butter while not letting your precious raw milk go to waste.

 

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As the sun began to rise the sound “cawwwwwr” made it’s way in the bedroom window, it was jarring. I laid there bkinking the sleep from my eyes and instincually checking to see if the noise had roused the sleeping baby.

I hear Nathan quitly making his way out the door to investigate the sound, I hear the deck gate open and close. By the second “acawwwwwr” it hit me. This sound that is similar to a small animal dying is our chickens.

At first I was wondering if a chicken was hurt and dying… but I’d been telling my mother and Nathan that one of our hens was especially agressive, and had a funny build. Kind of like a rooster but nobody agreed with me. Surely we’d know it was a rooster by now, they were supposed to be all hens from the pet store…

“cawwwwwk”

It’s the sound of an adolescent rooster learning his call! A rooster, our hen is a rooster. Helga the burly mean hen is a he!

Now, if you’ve never had the pleasure of hearing a rooster learn his call, it’s really is quite terrible and funny at the same time. When they are first learning it’s nothing like the sounds you’d expect a rooster to make.

Once the realization hits me I make my way down the stairs to find Nathan coming in from outside. “That little shit is so proud of himself, fluffing his feathers and screaming from the top of the chicken coop…” Nathan says to me as he’s heading to the garage for some chicken treats to shut the rooster up.

Sure enough the chicken snacks quiet them down a bit, though he still tries to make his pathetic call every now and then. I am sure the neighbors love us today, we’re surely on EVERYONE’S shit list this fine saturday.

Obviously we can’t keep him from a noise complaint perspective. We are so close to our neighbors that it’s just not fair to them so chicken soup is on the menu.

If we had more land I’d be okay with one rooster, it sure would mean we’d have a self sustaining chicken flock… but we don’t have land and we can’t just do what we want with an HOA and all these people around us…

Helga has got to go in the stew pot so Nathan has begun watching how-to videos on the internet in preparation for his job ahead. He feels confidant and it seems we’ll learn an new aspect of homesteading/ self reliance in the coming week, a first hand lesson. We are about to butcher our first chicken for food.

Update 9/16/12:

Do we have a Helga #2?

Nobody crowed this morning or last night so that is nice for the neighbors… But, I just witnessed what appeared to be a “rooster spat” with feathers fluffed, chests puffed and them jumping at each other while kicking & pecking. It seems another of our Wyandotte’s looks much more like the rooster than the hen. See those waddles? What do you think? One rooster or two?

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