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Dessert

Butter Making

Butter made from sour cream by churning and washing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Butter Making

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 104°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Scald all utensils and bowls.

  2. Weigh each cup of cream, then subtract the weight of the empty cup to find the weight of the cream.

  3. Pour the weighed cream into a bowl or jar and label it with the temperature.

Adjust the cream temperature

  1. Pack the cream in ice to lower the temperature to 40°C (104°F).

  2. Let the cream stand until it reaches about 63°F to 65°F (comfortable room temperature) or, on a hot day, until it reaches 85°F.

  3. Warm gently to body temperature (98°F).

Churn and finish

  1. Cover the containers, note the time, and insert the egg beater or place lids on jars.

  2. Churn until the butter forms lumps, noting the time and temperature.

  3. Skim out the butter, wash it in cold salt water, and weigh it.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sour cream
Its fat globules are churned together into butter, and its cultured flavour carries into the finished butter.

The step that matters

Adjust the cream temperature. Cream that is too cold resists forming butter, while cream that is too warm forms soft, greasy butter. Fat globules clump most readily within a moderate temperature range, so the cream must reach the target temperature before churning.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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