Simple and easy recipe with video tutorial on how to make butter from raw or pasteurized cream to enjoy the ancestral health benefits of this nutrient-dense traditional food.
Ah, homemade butter. Has there ever been a more perfect food?
To the Traditional Swiss living in the isolated Loetschental valley early in the last century, raw butter made from unpasteurized cream was a sacred food. No pale supermarket butter, but a golden alpine butter made from the rich, beige raw cream of cows grazing on thick grass.
The children raised on this nutrient-dense, raw butter had strong physiques, and wide faces with plenty of room for their teeth. They also had high resistance to disease. There wasn’t a single case of TB in the Loetschental Valley despite this illness raging elsewhere in Switzerland during the early part of the 1900s. At that time, the Swiss villagers still existed on foods grown or sourced themselves in the valley. Only salt was brought in from the outside.
The young men raised on this nutrient-dense traditional diet with plenty of raw, deep yellow butter were so perfect and pleasing in physique, strength, and character that the Vatican favored them over all others in Europe to serve as the Papal Guard.
The Loetschental Swiss knew that it was this nutrient-dense, raw butter that was responsible for their robust health. The indigenous Swiss would put wicks in bowls of the first spring butter and burn it in their Churches!
We now know that this sacred food contained ample amounts of true Vitamin A, D, and K2. When sufficient amounts of these fat-soluble vitamins are present in the diet, they work synergistically to produce a level of health unknown in modern civilization.
The Importance of Raw Butter in the Diet
When I first became knowledgeable on the subject of Traditional Diets, obtaining plenty of raw, grass-fed butter for my family became a primary goal.
The problem was that raw butter was not available anywhere near where I lived. I couldn’t even find raw cream or unpasteurized milk for that matter!
Determined to have this sacred food for my husband and me (I was pregnant at the time) and for my oldest child who was a young toddler, I sourced quarts of frozen, raw grass-fed cream from elsewhere and shipped in 9 or more quarts a month for my family’s use.
With some of that beautiful beige, grass-fed cream, I would make the most tantalizing, golden butter for my family. I continued this habit for many years.
I am fortunate that now I am able to obtain raw, grass-fed butter locally so I rarely have to make my own raw butter anymore. However, I thought it would be helpful to show you how to make this sacred food for yourself in case some of you are in the same predicament that I was many years ago – desperately wanting raw, grass-fed butter but unable to find any!
How to Source Grassfed Cream
The only thing you really need when making butter is quality pastured cream. Don’t use anything else or your butter will turn out white or at best pale yellow. A light-colored butter indicates a low amount of fat-soluble vitamins.
The easiest route is to buy quarts of raw, grass-fed cream from a local farm. If you don’t have a local grass-based dairy farm nearby, you can request your local health food store to stock a pasteurized cream.
Natural by Nature is a good brand as is this pastured A2 cream.
This brand of Devon cream is excellent too and can be mail-ordered to your door.
Be sure to avoid UHT pasteurized cream by Organic Valley as it is too overly processed.
If you can obtain raw, pastured milk but not cream, you could also take the cream off the top of a gallon or two of the milk using a turkey baster and make butter with that cream.
The key is to get creative!
Don’t take no for an answer if you can’t find quality cream where you live. Figure out where to get it whether it be sucked off the top of a few gallons of grass-fed milk or shipped in from another place. A great way to find farms that will mail order cream to you can be found in the Weston A. Price Foundation Shopping Guide.
Can’t Tolerate Butter?
If due to allergy or availability, you are unable to enjoy the benefits of pastured raw butter on a regular basis, it is very important to be sure you’re getting sufficient Vitamin K2 (called the “X-Factor” by Dr. Price) in the diet via a whole food derived K2 supplement (as MK-7, the fermented form). Another dairy-free option to obtain K2 (as MK-4, the animal form) is Australian emu oil.
Both forms of Vitamin K2 synergize with Vitamin A and D obtained in the diet and/or via high vitamin cod liver oil for maximum absorption and effectiveness. The three together are particularly effective at maintaining the health of the teeth and gums.
Homemade Butter
The recipe below details the instructions demonstrated in the video tutorial. You may use either raw or pasteurized cream, preferably from pastured animals.
Note that once you make the butter, you can easily take it one more step to make homemade ghee, which is shelf-stable. Both ghee and raw butter oil are concentrated forms of all the goodness of butter!
How to Make Butter
Recipe for homemade butter using pasteurized or raw cream. Super easy and when sourced from pastured cows, is one of the healthiest foods on the planet.
Ingredients
- 1 quart cream preferably raw and grassfed
- 1 large glass bowl
- 1 hand mixer
Instructions
-
Pour cream into the bowl and let come to room temperature.
-
Turn on hand mixer on medium speed and mix until the cream turns into butter. You will know this because suddenly, the butter will separate from the buttermilk in the bowl and change color to yellow. This takes about 3 minutes.
-
Add 2 cups ice cold water and remix for a few seconds. Pour butter mixture into a fine mesh cheesecloth, gather up the ends and squeeze bag to strain out the water mixed with buttermilk. Repeat this rinsing process one or two more times as desired to make sure all the buttermilk is removed for the sweetest tasting butter.
-
Scoop the butter into a small container with a lid. Refrigerate.
Recipe Video
Recipe Notes
If you use slightly soured cream in this recipe instead of fresh cream, you will have cultured butter!
Reference
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Dr. Weston A. Price
To Sarah or anyone else that may know:
How long does the raw butter last in the fridge, or out on the counter?
Also, the butter does change flavor as it gets older. Does this indicate that it is going bad, or is this just some sort of souring that only changes the flavor and not the nutritional quality?
Thanks ahead of time
Raw butter lasts for months and months. I’ve never wasted any .. it get used up long before that! If you make a ton at once and want to preserve the sweet flavor as raw butter will tend to get stronger in flavor over time, then freeze it.
The stronger flavor over time is just the raw butter culturing .. it does not mean it is going bad.
I really want to make my own butter but I don’t want to skim the cream off of our milk because my son drinks it and I can’t buy raw cream in our area. We buy pastured butter but it’s pasteurized, unfortunately.
Thanks.
Do you cook with this butter or just use it raw, would cooking with it destroy its nutritional value?
Also a little off topic, when you make homemade ice cream what do you sweeten it with? I use my raw cream and milk to make it, but feel like I am ruining it by using sugar to sweeten it.
Thanks!!!
Yes, you can cook with it. The enzymes will be destroyed but the superior nutritional content is still there.
TIP: Raw butter makes THE MOST AMAZING grilled cheese sandwiches in the WORLD.
I have a video on me making raw ice cream if you check the free video tab at the top of the blog. I use grade B maple syrup to sweeten it.
Honey works well for ice cream too. I use about a 1/3 cup honey for every 1 1/2 quarts ice cream.
I hope this video starts a raw butter making trend!!!
The first time I made Raw Butter, I was amazed that it tasted like cream! I was so used to the “butter” tasting like oilyness, it was refreshing to get a fresh cream taste.
This came in handy when my farmer said that there was wild garlic that got caught in the hay making, so the cream and milk may have an off taste. So, I made Raw Garlic Butter! It was so interesting to learn that the fat really was where all the flavor was, and how intimately I was connected to what Cows eat when I drink their butter. It was probably a defining moment in how I thought about milk.
Because it’s so EASY and your energies have been put into tackling the complicated issues! 🙂
We have made raw butter before. My daughter loves it my son not so much. My husband was SHOCKED over the rich color of it. That was the fun part.
Yes, making your own grassfed butter shows you just how much lower in nutrition the other butter from the store really is .. even the organic butters.
What a great video! Thanks for showing how to do it. I have made butter only a few times, mostly because we drink ALL the raw milk available to us and have no cream left over. I have heard that skim milk is not worth drinking, so here is my question: What can be done with the skim milk left from skimming off the cream to make butter????
It makes great fertilizer. My farmer sprays it on his pastures!!! Makes the worms go nuts and grass really grow.
Wow. I have never heard of this! Great tip! thanks.
Ah! The answer to my burning question! I can never find an answer to what to do with the leftover milk.
Now, is it okay to drink the skimmed milk? Make yogurt with it? I’m concerned about the lack of fat in the milk or yogurt and how it would be digested if the cream is missing.
Yes, of course you can use it as long as the rest of your diet is not lowfat. People on lowfat diets are tummy bug magnets (see my post on the reasons for this) and so I never recommend folks on a conventional lowfat diet to drink raw skim milk as they get gastro illness so much that they would probably blame the raw milk when it was something else they ate because they are so predisposed to gastro problems all the time.
We normally just skim off 1/3-1/2 of the cream that is on top of our milk. Is that okay to do? I’ve never even thought about the fact that we’re drinking a less fatty milk! Maybe because we’re still eating all that cream as well?.
Where is your post on this effect of lowfat diets making people susceptible to tummy bugs? Could you provide a link?
The point is very interesting about the protective qualities of fats and not recommending people on conventional lowfat diets drink raw skim milk since they’d probably blame the raw milk when it was something else they ate as a result of their inadequate lowfat diet. I remember Sally Fallon saying in her DVD presentation that butter has a unique fatty acid profile that supports the immune system and kills pathogens in the gut. The lowfat diet is harmful in so many ways, and the anti-cholesterol campaign so misguided and disastrous. The point about the tummy bug susceptibility is useful to know about in the context of the raw milk movement because of the tendency of mainstream medicine and ER personnel to point the finger at raw milk and not look any further to the cause of food-borne illness once someone says they consumed raw dairy.
Gotta go eat some raw butter now…
Thanks, Sarah!
our chicken farmer does this..
-jason and lisa-
Yes, OK, I will keep that in mind. However, it seems an expensive fertilizer, at the price we pay for the milk. My husband calls it “liquid gold” because of the price. Maybe we’ll just keep drinking it. I buy Amish “Minerva” butter, which is pastured but not raw.
Kim, you don’t have to skim all the cream off either.
I like to make yogurt with part skim milk. Also, some cheeses actually call for skim or part skim milk. Worth looking in to.
We have a Jersey cow and she gives a quart of cream on every gallon of milk…that’s more than a little rich for drinking, so we skim about half that for butter and drink the rest. It’s perfect that way!
Yes, that could definitely work. I’ll try that.
Would the ‘raw’ skim milk left after skimming the cream be beneficial to drink if I make kefir with it?
Note that in the video, there was hardly any buttermilk once the cream turned into butter so I went straight into washing the butter. Sometimes you will get a lot of buttermilk when you make your butter, so feel free to pour that off to use for other things before washing the butter.
Thanks so much for that Sarah! I am American(originally from Louisianna) but live in the southwest of England! We are very blessed with loads of grassfed cows here! raw milk, cream, and yogurt are super easy to get here. They even deliver once a week to my doorstep! So awesome! I recently found your website after reading rami’s book cure tooth decay and fell in love with your videos and tradtional cooking enthusiasm. My two year old is suffering from severe tooth decay so we are trying our best to help him heal naturally rather than have him filled full of toxic drugs and have his teeth capped/filled like they did to me 30 years ago at his age! We never allowed sugary foods and he is breastfed even now. We didn’t know about fermentation of grains til about a month ago and he was fed lots of oats which are apparently the worst! My other son has gorgeous healthy teeth! He’s been very good with his cod liver and butter oil and I load the raw butter on all of his meals! Lol. Anyway thanks so much again Sarah! U are a wonderful inspiration for all moms!
Rami is one neat guy. I met him at a Conference in 2010 (ended up having quite the in depth conversation at about 2am in the morning!!) and was very impressed with what he is doing with his research into tooth decay, grains etc and how to solve tooth problems even seemingly intractable ones with diet. He is helping so many people. Glad you found his book!
Hi Amanda,
I am new to the real foods diet and would like to source raw milk products for my family. I also live in the Southwest of England and would love to know where you get your products and who delivers to your door? I would be very grateful if you’d leave some details for me. Thank you!
I live in Weymouth, Dorsetand I have to go and pick up my raw milk. I’m new to raw milk, but love it.
Thank you for this information. My son thinks it is so amazing to make butter =)
How long would you say the shelf life is for raw butter? Will it start to turn like milk after a couple weeks?
Love!
Raw butter has probiotics and enzymes which act as a natural preservative. It lasts for months! It also freezes and thaws beautifully if you like to make a lot at once.