From Pasture to Plate: How We Make Our Handcrafted Butter

Some things don’t need to be complicated to be spectacular. And our handcrafted butter is made just like our grandparents would make it!

On a butter making day, we start by disinfecting our butter churn, and prepping our heavy cream. Butter making only requires one ingredient really and that’s cream, but we add salt to add just a little something to the creamy goodness. We bottle our heavy cream on bottled milk day, with the excess cream that is skimmed off the top of skim milk (hence the name skim milk). When we are ready to go, Riley will start by pouring 38 gallons of cream into a funnel that sends the cream flowing into the butter churn. Once it’s filled, we start the churn and it will spin for about 90 minutes.

The temperature of the cream actually affects the time in which it takes to make butter. Colder cream will take longer to churn into butter than warmer, room temperature cream. After a while of sloshing around in the churn, the agitated butter will transform into a whipped substance we all know and love: whipped cream. Now, we could stop here and enjoy freshly whipped cream (a whole churn’s worth!), but we keep the churn going. We haven’t reached our final product yet!

Once we hear the solid butter sloshing around in the churn, we know it’s time to add the salt. Riley will remove the door from the churn, add in our salt, and allow the butter to churn a little bit longer to mix in the only added ingredient to our cream.

Then we need to drain off the white liquid from the butter churn, this is our byproduct of butter making – butter milk! Butter milk can be used to make pancakes, biscuits, or delicious cake. Once the buttermilk is drained off, we will rinse our butter three times with cold water. This makes any remaining buttermilk  expel off the butter.

Then Riley will scoop out all of the butter from the churn by hand! The 38 gallons of cream will result in roughly 140 lbs of butter – so it takes some muscles to get it out of the churn!

Then it’s time to wrap our butter! We hand-roll our salted butter into logs each weighing one pound. The butter is a sticky play-dough consistency, so it’s quite the forearm workout to hand roll and package all of those 140 logs into one-pound packages. It takes about 2 hours to package all of our butter logs.

And there you have it: farm fresh butter. From there, our handcrafted butter is ready to be stocked in the store, or loaded on the delivery truck for home delivery or a wholesale order.

From the barn to store shelf in only three miles, and a little bit of elbow grease — that’s pretty awesome.

“It’s probably the freshest butter you’ll get!” – Danie, one of our expert butter makers