Originally published by The Clifton Courier, August 5, 2020

I recently made my own butter.

I’d watched a YouTube video of a guy called Todd explaining how to do it. And, look, you don’t really need a recipe for it.

It’s just mixing cream. That’s literally all it is.

This Todd fellow said it would take between 15 and 20 minutes of mixing until the cream splits and then you’re left with gunk and juices – which is to say, buttermilk and clumps of butter. You then yank the butter clumps out of the cloudy water and squeeze it into a ball. Then you change the mixing method slightly to squeeze the buttermilk out of the butter so it doesn’t go rancid.

But Todd, as helpful as his video was, didn’t say anything about salt.

I’m a big believer in salted butter. Unsalted butter is deeply disappointing, devoid of soul and, in my eyes, nothing short of an abomination.

So looked around for advice on when to introduce salt to the mix.

Thankfully, my answer came in the form of the Orthodox Christian Cooking Show. You could say it was a higher being guiding me to that particular video, but you could also say the video’s title contained the right combination of key words to be given top billing in my Google search enquiry.

Father Vlad tried making butter in the same way Todd did, working the salt in at the end. He also tried adding the salt to the cream at the very beginning, but found the salt sided with the buttermilk and abandoned the actual butter. His conclusion was that adding the salt at the end was the best method.

So, armed with the wisdom of Todd and Father Vlad, I set about my quest.

I decided to take notes of the process. But my notes look like an edgy, angry form of contemporary poetry. I also recorded some videos, which could be likened to performance art.

So what’s below is not a recipe, but a creative journey I embarked on. There will be times when I refer to my notes, which will be sprinkled in here and there in an italicised font. The notes are time stamped, because when I set out to make this, I wanted to know roughly how long it took me.

Here goes:

I knew it could take a little more time for me to make my butter because while both my buttery mentors had large, powerful standing mixers, I had a little electric hand mixer with mini whisks.

So instead of sentencing myself to standing all that time in the kitchen, I grabbed an extension cord to allow me to use the mixer while seated on the lounge room floor and got myself comfy. I read something in the comments about keeping things cold, so I grabbed a large bowl, put some ice in the bottom with a bit of water, then put a smaller bowl inside that bowl. Then I tipped the cream into that smaller bowl and began to mix.

It didn’t take long until the cream got to that delightful whipped state. You know, the pillowy peaks that look so soft you want to cocoon yourself inside them like a cherub sleeping on a cloud (except your body heat would quickly melt the cream, making you all sticky and embedding your skin with a musty, hot milk smell).

I was thrilled to discover the bowl with the cream in it was spinning on its own accord in the ice water bath I’d made with the bigger bowl, meaning I didn’t have to spin the bowl to make sure all the cream was being mixed evenly. I felt like a kind of a genius, actually. Rather than having to splash out on a mixer that rotated the bowl for even stirring, I had created a low-fi thrifty version.

My first note was recorded at 11.17am.

By this point it had been a few minutes and I was staring down the barrel of the mixers, seeing the bottom of the yellow bowl come into view for a fraction of a second between rotations. It was hypnotising, but my hair falling dangerously close to the whisks gave me visions of being scalped by a kitchen utensil, which soon pulled me out of my whippy stupor.

11.21 stiiiiiiill cream

At this point, I wasn’t expecting the cream to be butter, but I was hoping for a bit of reassurance I was on the right track.

I looked into the bowl of white clouds looking for answers. I wanted to see the whirls of cream twist and whirl into a sign.

But all I saw was cream.

Tune in next week to see how all this pans out.