Homeschool Experiment - We Made Butter!!!!

I'm so excited because today the kids and I made our own butter!!! Now why you may ask, are we making our own butter....well, over the past few months we've read in two different sources about how people at different times of history have made butter. It just happened to come up twice in our studies. The first time was during our reading of Little House in the Big Woods and the second was during our Bible studies, we learned about Joseph's life as a boy. Both times butter making was mentioned and we wondered if we could do it ourselves. So I did a little online research and found out that we could and we didn't need to buy anything special to do it. So today we gave it a try. We bought heavy whipping cream to use. We used a plastic container with a tight fitting lid and a marble. We poured about 2/3 of the container full of cream and dropped the marble in. The marble adds more agitation which helps the butter to form. Then we sealed it up and taped the lid just to be sure and started shaking!! Here's pics of the kids shaking (please excuse the pj's and messy hair, this is how "school" normally looks in our home!!)

I ended up doing most of the shaking as it took about 20 minutes start to finish. After about 15 of the minutes, it felt like I couldn't get it to shake loose anymore and we peeked inside. It looked like white whipped butter. I knew from my reading that we were close to being done, but not quite. So I shook it about 5 more minutes and then it became amazingly easy to shake again and I knew it was ready. What happened was the butter finally separated from the buttermilk (as you can kind of see in the picture below). I thought it was so cool how a minute ago it was all mixed together and then it just separated into two different things!! Wow!!! (If you try this, don't forget to take the marble out!!)

So then we strained the buttermilk into a bowl to save and use for a recipe later (pancakes or something???) and had yellow butter left in the strainer. It was also so cool how the butter turned yellow. It was like a miracle!! (I know, I'm easily amazed, but it was so cool!!)

We then all took turns giving the butter a little love pat to get any remaining buttermilk out and then we sprinkled a little salt on it (it keeps it from going bad quickly).

And then I formed it into a shape resembling a butter stick!!!

And then to try it out, I made biscuits with our lunch and slathered some of the fresh yummy butter on them. Oh my where they delicious!!! Here's the kids eating their lunches.

Overall, I think this was my favorite experiment ever (well this and the time we got dry ice in our Omaha steak package and played with it for awhile!!). I don't know how to explain it, but I was just awed at God during the whole process. I mean he created the cows that give the milk to use and I bet he thought of how the butter would be made back in the beginning. It really is such a cool process!!!