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Making Butter
Julie's mom, Ruth Macy, makes a lot of the items we eat or use on the ranch. Today I watched her make butter.
The milk directly from the cow has a high amount of cream. The cream is separated from the milk (I will show you
the milk separator and process in a later website entry). We use the cream for a variety of meals, for example, adding
to oatmeal, using it to cream our coffee, and for making whipped cream or butter.
Most of the tools Miss Macy uses to make the butter are sold in the cities as antiques. The tools Miss Macy uses
are actually much older than many of the items being sold in the antique shops.
The first tool used is a churn. The picture below is of a hand churn Miss Macy has in her house, but, no longer
uses.
The wooden items in front of the churn are the two pieces of the butter mold and I will show you pictures of how
Miss Macy uses them below.
Miss Macy uses a more modern (yet still considered an antique collectible) churn that is run by an electrical motor.
In the above picture the electric churn has cream in it that has already been churned into butter. The only
ingredient used is cream and sometimes, if the cream is too thick, a small amount of the separated milk is added back into
the cream.
Miss Macy then puts the churned butter into a bowl and, in the picture below, you can see it is of a real rough
consistency.
She uses a small butter paddle (also considered an antique by city folks) to smooth out the butter.
The next few pictures will show you how she uses the butter paddle to pack the butter into the butter mold. She
then pushes the butter out of the mold with the insert piece of the mold. This results in a cube of butter that weighs approximately
one pound.
The cube of butter is wrapped in wax paper and stored in the refrigerator or freezer until needed to butter toast, make
cookies or for other yummy stuff.
Hopefully sometime soon, when you visit us here in Sulphur Springs, you will be able to taste this great butter.
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