Crazy But Able

While reading one of Peggy’s “1024 fun science experiments for kids” books, I ran across one that seemed simple enough: make your own butter. According to the book, you buy some heavy whipping cream, put it in an airtight container with a marble or two, shake it a few times, and blammo, fresh butter. That’s easy!

So I bought some heavy whipping cream, put it in an air tight container with a marble or two, and started shaking. And kept shaking. And kept shaking. And kept shaking.

After about five minutes of this, I googled. Turns out it takes at least fifteen minutes of shaking to get butter from heavy whipping cream. Who has that kind of time?

So I started thinking about ways to cheat and not have to shake this damn thing for the next ten minutes (”Uh, hey, Home Depot guy, can you put this Ball jar in your paint mixer? k-thx, I’ll be back in 10 minutes!”), and my memory dredged up a vignette from an old hippie farming book. The wife would go out and milk the Ecologically Unoppressed cow, bring in the milk, put it in the blender, and whammo! fresh butter. Right.

Into the blender. Slow speed. Rrrrrrrr… etc. Suddenly, the blender went WHEEEEEEEEEEEE like it was just spinning doing nothing. Which, of course, it was. Long story short: I wound up with half a blender of stuff that was almost halfway butter, and half a blender of partially whipped cream.

Stupid hippies. I must need a hippie solar blender that only spins 30 times a minute or something. I went on Amazon.com to see if they had any electric butter churns, and you know what? Of course they do. Isn’t capitalism great?

Anyway. I’m open to suggestions as to what I should do with this stuff. Anyone have any good ideas?

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 15th, 2005 at 10:24 pm and is filed under general foofiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.