Home made butter (Part 1)

Don't do this if you hate a cluttered kitchen

Goats milk contains about 3.7 - 4.0% butterfat. So you are only going to get 40g butterfat from a litre of milk at best. The first step with butter making is to separate the cream from the milk. The milk used to be set in shallow dishes and the cream skimmed off when it had risen to the surface, Progress brought the cram separator, a clunking contraption of steel, gears and pulleys. The separator is does its job well but its so complex that its a nightmare to clean.

My separator is designed for domestic use, 50L/hr, much of made of plastic and costing less than £50 plus postage from Ukraine.  It is brilliant and less than ten percent of the cost of a British or other European machine.  The downside is that the instructions are in Russian or maybe Ukrainian but there's a link to a YouTube video that show what to do.

Once set up I processed 15L milk in about ten minutes. A word of warning....... if you are going to do this remove the carpets, have plenty of cloths and a mop at hand and big bowls for the skimmed milk.

"Scalding" the cream in a double boiler

I extracted 400ml cream from 15 litres of milk, 3.75% I think. The cream was then scalded at 77C, cooled quickly and stored in the fridge until tomorrow and part 2