Easy Homemade Butter With a Blender or Food Processor

It’s hard to beat freshly churned homemade butter! This easy homemade butter recipe harnesses up your blender or food processor to churn your butter for you. It makes for a great opportunity to sit down for a few minutes and enjoy a cup of coffee while you wait!

Butter is one of the easiest dairy products to make at home, and probably the best recipe to start with if you are new to home dairying! All you will need are heavy cream and a good quality blender or food processor. My favorite tool for this job is my Vitamix 5200. My Vitamix is my absolute favorite kitchen tool I use for everything from applesauce and baby food, to smoothies and ice cream, to butter and peanut butter, to flour and grinding spices.

With the Vitamix, you can just set the dial to blend at the speed you want and do something else while it works for you. Pretty nice!

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Easy Homemade Butter

Step 1. Culture butter if desired. Pour into a blender and turn on low. Blend the cream until the sound changes and lumps of butter appear in the cream.

Step 2. Strain the butter. Save the liquid buttermilk!

Step 3. Wash the butter with water. The cleaner you get the butter, the longer it will last!

Step 1

Pour 2 cups heavy cream into a blender or food processor.

For sweet butter, use cream straight out of the fridge, for “cultured” butter, let the cream sit, covered on the counter for several hours. Cultured butter tends to whip up faster, and cream that is a few days or even a week old usually churns faster and yields more than fresh cream.

Turn the blender on low: with my Vitamix I set the dial to “3”.

This is the part where you get to sit down with a cup of coffee!

After a while, the sound will suddenly get quieter and if you look at your cream, you’ll notice it looks like whipped cream. Your butter is almost done. Keep the blender on until it separates into chunks of butter floating in liquid.

This butter is done!

Step 2

Pour the butter and milk into a fine mesh strainer set on top of a bowl, and let it drain for a few minutes. The liquid is buttermilk!

Step 3

Transfer the butter to a bowl and start rinsing with cool water. Use a large spoon to stir the butter, pressing all the remaining buttermilk out. When the water gets cloudy, pour it out and add fresh cool water. Keep rinsing and stirring unto the water comes clear. Any buttermilk left in the butter will cause it to sour faster. The cleaner you can get it, the longer it will keep. When the rinsing water is clear, press out any remaining water with your spoon. Salt if desired.

Your butter is finished!

I store mine in the freezer, just getting out a few days’ worth at a time. Typically homemade butter will not be as clean as grocery store butter, so does not keep as long in the fridge.

Yield will vary with each batch of cream, but the highest yield I get is about 1lb of butter from 1 quart of cultured, week-old heavy cream. If you are using fresher cream or making uncultured (sweet) butter, expect to get slightly less.

I get my home dairying supplies from New England Cheesemaking Supply as well as from Azure Standard.