Making Butter

While we were all dressed up as cows, we had a great discussion about dairy products.  Many students remembered from our Nutrition unit that milk, cheese, yogurt and butter are all dairy.  What they couldn't quite figure out was how milk turned into butter.  So we decided to find out.

Making butter requires just 1 ingredient: heavy cream.

Put the cream into Ziploc bowls with a screw lid.  You can also use baby food jars, but we did not have a stockpile of them so the Ziploc bowls worked fine.  Then start shaking!

It's so simple.  As the kids are shaking, they will feel it turning into thick whipped cream.  Tell them to keep shaking!  After just another minute, the cream will pull away from the sides of the jar and form a solid ball.  If you open the jar and it has a cottage cheese texture, go ahead and shake it just a little bit longer.  It will form a pat of butter with an extra pool of buttermilk.  Just pour the buttermilk off, and voila!  Butter!  (You can add a dash of salt before you refrigerate it.)

We served the butter with muffins at our Mother's Day tea party.

Have fun playing and learning with your children today.