We were able to make homemade butter this past week! While we were away at the beginning of the month we had a goat-sitter milking for us. We returned home to several gallons of milk and decided it was time to test out our cream separator.  The separator has been sitting in its box for months now because it takes a couple of gallons to get enough cream to make the process worth it. With a house full of boys, we go through milk too quickly to ever really have enough!  So we took full advantage of the excess and made our first attempt at butter.

The cream separator is this… thing. I don’t quite know how to describe it, but it’s necessary for making goat milk butter. Cream rises to the top easily in cow’s milk, but the fat globules in goat milk are smaller, making it naturally homogenized. That means that in order to get cream from goat milk, you either have to wait many days for the cream to rise and carefully skim it off the top (and even then, there’s generally quite a lot still in the milk), or use a cream separator.

The separator makes use of centrifugal force to send cream out one side and skim milk out the other. The force flings the milk, which is heavier than the cream, towards the outside while the cream collects in the middle.  The separator was really fun to watch in action.  Milk pouring out of the spout on one side, thick cream from the other.

Once the cream separator had done its thing, we whipped the cream in the mixture until we were left with butter. You probably noticed that our butter is white, not yellow. The creamy, yellowish tint in cows milk comes from carotene. Cows don’t synthesize carotene as well as goats, which leaves their milk slightly yellow, while goats milk is starkly white. Yes, it looks like Crisco, but I promise that it’s butter. And delicious butter, at that! My only complaint about it was my own fault: I put in too much salt.

Oh well. It’s still great on potatoes and the like, despite the fact that we won’t be able to enjoy it slathered on fresh homemade bread like we’d hoped.