Butter - God's Good Fat

Ahh...we used to make butter - such an enjoyable and tasty delight! This article is a worthwhile read, especially if you've been indoctrinated by fat and/or cholesterol = bad. Food as God made it, or produced without wine, dine, refine to it, is good.  I've used a food processor - 3 minutes to make butter.  Amazing!

Kitchen Notes ~ Making Butter by Michael Chu

Sometimes, buying cream in bulk is too good of a deal to pass up. For about the price of two cups (470 mL) of heavy cream at the supermarket, you can pick up a half gallon (8 cups) at the local wholesaler. But, unless you're cooking for a party, that's a lot of cream to use up before you hit the expiration date. After you've made a couple cream pies, clam chowder, and topped your angel food cake, you realize that you've only used four cups of cream! What do you do with the rest? Well. . . I make butter.

I suppose I'm obliged to talk briefly about how butter isn't actually bad for you and how natural saturated fats can actually be beneficial to your body and, maybe, even necessary for good health. I'll try to keep it short: In an earlier article on the topic of Saturated Fats, Cholesterol, and Heart Disease, I wrote about the misinformation concerning saturated fats (the family of fats that butter belongs to) and questioned the link between cholesterol and heart disease. Scientific studies that make a distinction between natural fats and processed fats show that previous evidence that linked fat consuming with obesity and heart disease may not be as straightforward as the commonly believed notion that fat consumption increases weight gain and the risk of heart disease. More and more often, as studies are being conducted more accurately (by not lumping processed fats with natural fats in the same category of study), it is being shown that there is either no correlation between natural fat consumption and obesity and in some cases an argument can be made that the consumption of natural fats can actually promote weight loss! Cholesterol has been "feared" in the last thirty years because it is suspected to be an indicator of heart disease. However, as study after study shows that blood serum levels of cholesterol are less accurate at indicating risk than a meteorologist is at predicting weather two weeks in advance. In fact, cholesterol is a fundamental building block of the human body necessary for proper operation of our brains, maintains a healthy digestive system, is a fundamental building block for many hormones, and serves as the body's main healing agent. It is in this capacity (as a healing agent) that has perhaps caused the most confusion in the understanding of how cholesterol works in the human body. When large amounts of cholesterol are found in the brain of someone afflicted with Alzheimer's disease or who has suffered a stroke, is the cholesterol the cause of the problem or is it there because the body is trying to fix a problem? Many researchers are beginning to believe that what is readily accepted in the medical community (that cholesterol contributes to heart disease, strokes, Alzheimer's, etc.) may in fact be a misinterpretation of the facts. Cholesterol is often found in the plaque that forms on the interior lining of arteries, but more and more researchers believe that the cholesterol is being used by the body to fix damage caused by other substances (such as polyunsaturated fats that have broken down releasing free radicals). Additional research has recently shown that the consumption of cholesterol helps to regulate blood serum cholesterol levels as well. Not only does feeding dietary cholesterol to individuals with low serum level increase their cholesterol, but feeding dietary cholesterol to those who have high cholesterol levels actually brings the level down. High serum level of cholesterol are typically caused by the body's overproduction of cholesterol and the dietary intake of cholesterol provides triggers to the body to reduce the excess production. It should also be noted that dietary cholesterol accounts for less than 1% of the cholesterol circulating in the blood and is less than 0.2% of the total body pool of cholesterol in the average person. 

It turns out that butter is excellent source of vitamins, anti-tumerogenic fatty acids, anti-microbial fatty acids, and dietary cholesterol. Cream has the same properties as butter, but butter is like concentrated cream - with all the health benefits, plus it cooks up real nice and lends wonderful flavors that can't be duplicated no matter how much companies try to mimic the flavor with margarine. 

Making butter is simple and easy (with modern appliances). You can churn the butter from cream in a blender, food processor, mixer, or even some bread machines. All you need is a machine or device that will agitate the cream so that the fat globules in the cream are destabilized. This causes the fat globules to start to clump. This clumping first enables tiny air bubbles to be trapped in the cream forming a relatively stable foam that we know of as whipped cream. When the agitation continues, the fat globules begin to clump so much that the air and fluid being help in place cannot be contained any longer. The foam seizes and the fat network begins to break down into large fat clusters that we call butter. In this example, I'll use a standing mixer to produce almost a pound of butter.

To finish the article and learn how to make butter click HERE.