Making Butter

Yesterday for our preschool activity, I wanted to make butter with the boys.  I used a couple of different websites as my resources:

Not Just Cute - which is a site I recently found and like well, &
Bright Hub - which is a site I also recently found and would like to spend more time exploring.

So this is what we did.  We filled up glass baby food jars (stage 2 or 3 worked well for us) with heavy whipping cream.  We found that HEAVY whipping cream really does work better.  By "better," what I really mean is "faster." Because, let me tell you, it is difficult to get kids to shake a little jar for anything more than 5 minutes, much less the 30 minutes that it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect on.  So, yes, I got the cream to churn to butter with plain whipping cream (I tried it just to see if it would work), but the heavy whipping cream works way faster.  In the interest of time, we also added marbles to our jars because the extra agitation helps the butter churn more quickly too.

We then went on to sing, "Old MacDonald" about 30 (million) times.  I read some farm-themed books like, Buzz Said the Bee.  We shake danced.  We shaked out rhythms together.  And then, when we still didn't have butter in our little jars, we put them in the fridge and went away to take a break.


Later, when our arms had decided they weren't quite so tired anymore, we came back to shake some more.  This time it only took a few more crucial minutes to get that little ball of butter.  The boys were so interested in seeing the cream start to coagulate, then bunch all up, and finally resemble the butter that they know and love.  I opened the lid periodically so they could see, feel and taste the cream in its various stages.


After achieving butter status, I dumped the little glob out into my hand and explained a little bit about the curds and whey.  We may have recited "Little Miss Muffit" a few times.  But that's only because I'm a total nerd for that sort of stuff (the English teacher coming out in me).  We rinsed off the butter and dug in.  Yum!

We had made some breadsticks and had them on hand to dip into our butter, but that part is totally subjective :-)  Also, adding a bit of salt to the butter makes it taste a little more "normal."  But again, that part is totally subjective.