How to Make Butter at Home

Learn how to make butter at home in 5 different ways with just one ingredient and a few simple steps! This homemade butter recipe provides rich, creamy, and absolutely delicious results!

💡 Expert Tip: Making butter with a mixer is my favorite method, you can use a stand mixer or an electric hand mixer.

Butter is made by churning cream or milk to separate the fat until it becomes a semi-solid emulsion. Originally the butter churning process was done by hand. Today that process has been replaced with mechanical churns.

There are several different ways to make homemade butter from cream, that we'll show you. You can use a mixer, blender, a jar or you can just do it the long way by hand!

In all cases, heavy cream will go through 4 different stages as the butter is being made.  When you first start mixing it will look frothy.

After a few minutes, it will turn into fluffy whipped cream. Whipping it further, the cream will break.

At the very end, it will become solid with white liquid. Put it in a fine mesh sieve over a bowl and squeeze any leftover buttermilk out. Form into a ball with your hands and put it into ice-cold water to remove all buttermilk.

This unsalted butter is perfect for baking. I recommend refrigerating it for about 3 weeks. It can also be stored in the freezer for many months.

To flavor butter, all you do is take room-temperature butter and mix it with flavoring ingredients in a bowl using a rubber spatula.

Most often made with just heavy cream, butter can be ready to use in all your favorite recipes or spread all over freshly baked bread, in just a matter of minutes!