Churning Butter and a Give Away

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When I was eight years-old we started getting our milk directly from the local dairy. After the glass gallon jars sat in the fridge overnight, there was a good two inches of cream at the top. I’m sorry to say that I thought cream was gross. I’d scoop it off when mom wasn’t looking, instead of shaking it up as directed, so that the “good” milk didn’t get contaminated with butter fats. Silly child. But the one good thing about all that cream was that sometimes my dad would scoop into a quart jar and make butter by simply shaking the jar. He had pretty good stamina because I remember him shaking for a long time. Then with a little salt, you had a very decent glob of butter. I loved butter.

All this came back to me the other day when I was whipping cream for a frosting and overwhipped it and came up with, you guessed it, whipped butter. I still put it on the cake, but it was a little greasier than it should have been. My husband is not particular, thank goodness.

Butter churning has been around for thousands of years. The earliest butter churns date back around 6,500 years to Israel. They were ceramic vessels that mimicked animal skins. Why? Because that was how nomadic cultures churned butter and made kefir. They put the cream in a vessel made of animal skin and shook it, very much like the way my dad would shake his quart jar, or even easier, simply tie it to a pack animal. The butter would churn as the animal walked. The ceramic churns were made to lay on their sides and rocked back and forth, sometimes with the aid of a rope.

The plunge churn was used in early America and is the churn I think of most often. It consists of a wooden contain into which the cream is poured, a flat lid with a hole and a plunger, which is worked up and down until butter forms. After the butter forms, the buttermilk (yes, that’s where it came from) is poured off and the butter is placed in a shallow trough called a butter worker. A fluted roller was rolled over the butter, water was added, then drained off. This process continued until all the buttermilk was removed from the butter.

 

The paddle churn is what my dad should have had. It’s a container, sometimes glass, that has a lid and a handle that turns a churn, which creates the butter.

The barrel churn appeared in 18th century Europe and works on the same principle as the paddle churn only on a larger scale.

There were of course many variations on these themes, including one in which the churn was attached to a rocking chair and the churner rocked their way to butter.  Someone else came up with a treadmill upon which a sheep or dog would walk to turn the crank and churn the butter. One of the more realistic designs involved a foot treadle like those on old fashioned sewing machines. That would have been my go-to.

Now let’s get silly. For a chance at a $10 Amazon gift card, what is the most creative way you can think of  to churn milk into butter?

96 thoughts on “Churning Butter and a Give Away”

  1. Shake it in a mason jar!

    My grandma used a plunge turn. My dad has it, her bowl, and butter pat. She would skim the cream off the top for coffee or butter. I remember watching her milk the cow, run the milk through cheesecloth several times before she let it set to separate. It’s the only time I had raw milk.

  2. My youngest daughter is learning a lot of new things that I didn’t teach her. like making sour dough bread. She recently made butter, I think using her electric mixer. I don’t know how creative that is, but seems to be quicker and easier than churning by hand.

  3. I’m not an engineer but think one could come up with a container to hold the cream that would attach to the wheel of a bicycle; pumping the pedals would turn the wheel and the cream would get agitated (hopefully the rider would go far enough to create butter).

  4. My first thought was to pour the milk into plastic (lighter than glass) containers, seal tightly and tie on, then salsa dance to churn! This constitutes a “two-fer,” since one is also burning calories…

  5. We made butter each week with a paddle churn. Milk from our Jersey cows. Doesn’t seen possible that was 75 years ago!

  6. You could put the cream in a round jug/small barrel and attach it to a hamster wheel. Then just let the the hamster run on the wheel and do all the work for you.??

  7. My uncle had a dairy so once a week we would all sit around the table and shake those glass jars to make butter while the electric churn was running too – we needed enough for 7-8 people per week! Still not a fan of buttermilk but Mom, Dad and Grandma would all drink it or use for baking cakes and biscuits!

  8. My grandparents had a dairy farm when I was growing up. Grandma used to give all of the grandkids who were there a small bottle of cream and we would make it a contest to see who could make butter fastest. Some of us shook the bottle, some rolled theirs around on the ground but the most creative way I found was to put the bottle into Grandma’s ice cream maker and crank the handle while the bottle rolled around in it. To my amazement it actually worked!

  9. Creative way to churn butter – hook it up to a stationary bike – exercise with delicious butter as a treat!

  10. The pioneers who took a cow along fastened the jar of cream onto the covered wagon, and the bumping, swaying, and jolting churned it into butter. When first married, my mom had a churn with a dasher she had to move up and down by hand. But I remember the electric dasher with a small motor she bought from the Sears catalogue that fit on top of the churn and did the same thing electrically.

  11. You say creative and I think Rube Goldberg style..which is still a contest hosted by Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

  12. I would attach it to my dog Boone, yes named after Daniel Boone who’s a Yellow Lab and constantly run around or rolling back and forth on the gound or even to his tail which is constantly waging. It would be done in no time.

  15. My Youngest Daughter made homemade butter when she was in school and they used a pint jar and ever since than she still makes homemade butter for her family Thank you for sharing have a Blessed Day!

  17. creative? The first thing that came to my mind is the exercise class I do weekly.
    Hook a pouch of cream to my backside while I do old lady yoga and dance.
    How about joggers. they could carry cream in a modified fanny pack???

  20. When I taught kindergarten, I would teach the children about making butter. We would put the cream in a tightly sealed quart jar. Then, during reading circle, while I was reading aloud, the children would pass the jar around, each one having a chance to shake it for a while. We easily made butter and it was a fun way for them to learn!

  24. We always churned milk growing up to make butter. My sister and I would take turns churning. Before you could do this you had to let the milk clabber. Mama would put the cream and milk in a churn, cover to top and let it sit a few days until it clabbered. Then we would churn it. I still have two of the churns Mama had, one had belonged to her daddy. After the butter started coming to the top, around the churn dasher, Mama would strain the buttermilk off and put the butter on a saucer and work it with the butter paddle. You had to work all the water out. She would then form it into a rounded mound the size of the saucer and use the paddle to make a star design on it. It was so pretty and the butter was yummy. She said she had to hide it from me because I would pick the whole patty up and start eating. lol Thanks for the memories.

  26. In Sunday School we put milk and salt in a ziplock bag and then put that inside another bag and the kids shook the bag to make a little bit of butter.

  27. So many churning contraptions , so very interesting. I think sitting on an exercise bicycle and have some ziplock bags strapped to your legs would work, maybe?? Have a great day, this is very interesting, Thank you for sharing this.

  28. Get my nephew to shake a jar for me… he works out, LOL!
    When I see something like this, it always makes me wonder who actually came up with making butter.

  30. When I taught 5th grade we would make butter by putting the ingredients in a ziplock bag and then we put the bag in a metal coffee can with a plastic lid. The students would get in groups of two or three and would sit outside on the concrete basket ball court and roll the can back and forth between them. They had a hard time believing that they would get butter but enjoyed it when we put it on toast after they had rolled it until the butter formed.

  31. You can put the to-be-butter in a can and play kick the can. Maybe you can also play pass the churner and each person gets some time to make butter.

  32. I love the barrel churn! I’ve only ever seen the plunge churn before. The only unique way that comes to mind is to make it in a cocktail shaker. 🙂

  34. I have made butter with a jar and just shaking it and it is very good. I guess you could do it with a mixer but I have never tried to do it that way.

  35. In a plastic container for my kids to shake it up with their excess energy. That would be a great way to tire out any child.

  36. I was thinking you could put the milk in a round leak proof plastic container and let children throw it back and forth to each other playing catch. They’re having fun while making butter.

  37. I remember churning with the plunge churn. It seemed to take forever. As a child, I did not have a lot of patience. I was told just to keep going. It was not ready yet. Thank you so much for sharing and bringing back such wonderful memories. God bless you.

    • Isn’t is funny how long tasks seem to take as a child? I thought hemming an entire skirt was simply too much of a task to face in one sitting when I was in 4H. Now the time flies by.

  40. We have had a group of kids roll a tight lidded plastic jar of cream back and forth to each other to make butter. I have an electric churn I ordered from Sears a long time ago. I haven’t used it for years because we quit keeping a milk cow once the kids grew up. My mother-in-law had a Daisy Churn, the kind with a paddle in a glass jar that you cranked by hand. Rinsing the butter and working it with a butter paddle or large spoon to get all of the buttermilk out is really important. I didn’t one time and had really soured milk flavored butter…..not good:)

  41. I can’t say it’s funny, but it might be – well kinda! My brother-in-law gave us some cream as he worked at a dairy. We took it home and I planned to make some whip cream Imagine my astonishment when my mixer turned a batch of BUTTER! I do not recall if I had sweetened while it was beating, or not. If so, it would have been horrible.

  42. When I was a preschool teacher, we took a plastic jar and put heavy cream in it. Then we passed it around for all the kids to “shake into butter”! Then everyone got to taste the butter that they made on bread for lunch!!!!!!!!! The kids had a blast passing and shaking the milk all up into butter.

  47. I don’t really know about churning butter, but maybe in a container shaking them while jumping on a trampoline if you have a lot of energy.

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