Making Butter and Whipped Cream in a Jar

I have seen so many tutorials and so many pins about how easy it is to make butter in a mason jar, I thought I would try it out. I happened to need some whipped cream that night so it worked out pretty well. Here’s a little tip…. use a BIG jar and let the milk sit out for about 30 minutes to warm up before you start. I tried this a couple of  times and the first time I used a pint jar and cold cream and it took forever. It did work but it was a lot of work. The next time I used a quart jar and only filled it about 1/3 of the way and let the cream sit for a bit to warm up. Then I added a pinch of kosher salt and put the lid on and got to shaking.

       

This is what it looked like after 2 minutes of very vigorous shaking.

        

This is after 4 minutes of even more vigorous shaking.

        

This is after 5 minutes of more vigorous shaking and after the infamous thump that everyone describes. It really is just out of nowhere, you go from shaking a liquid to shaking a liquid with a large lump of butter in it. At this point I drained half of the  liquid off and kept shaking.

         

This is what it looked like after 6 minutes for shaking and draining the liquid off.  I shook it out of the jar and “washed” the butter. Rinsed it in water while massaging the butter until the water was clear and them you have you very own fresh butter.



          

When it comes to the whipped cream I did the same trial and error. I used a smallish jar and filled it a bit too much the first time around. The next time I filled a pint jar a 1/3 of the way full and added some super fine sugar and split a vanilla bean in half and scraped the caviar into the milk. Stirred the mix together and and let it warm up a bit. then it was time to start shaking. After 2 minutes I had this…