On Rosh Hashanah, you’re supposed to relax in the afternoon. Cool. I can totally handle that.
But coming off of a sushi-induced coma from the most delicious lunch we had at Kobe, it took me a spell to think of a proper afternoon project. At which point I remembered this article from the NYT Bitten Blog and another NYT article on making butter.
Sounds easy enough, right?
Armed with a pint of Heavy Whipping Cream from Marcus’ refrigerator, I rolled over to my parents’ place to take a whack at making butter with a hand mixer (I do not have one at my place). I dumped the cream into a metal mixing bowl and set the speed on the hand mixer to high. Simple enough. When I felt like I was getting close, which was about three minutes after “whipped cream,” I tasted the mixture and could feel my butter just screaming to come out. The solid was there, but it was WAY too wet. So, I switched the speed from high to low, which solved the problem of how to get the buttermilk out. My bowl went from “moist solid” to “solid chunks of butter in a pool of buttermilk,” instantly.
This is the result after mixing – I’m draining the buttermilk off.
Which then brings us to the finished product – a salted butter with dried tarragon. I figured that was a good combination because it would taste nice on bread or would add a savory flavor if I threw a tablespoon of it into a dish.
I split the final product in half so that my parents could enjoy it too as I, you know, took over their kitchen for a couple of hours. Mom and I tasted the finished product on a slice of wheat bread and it was definitely delicious.
That leaves us with one final question mark – what does one do with the leftover buttermilk? Fear not. Thanks to my iPod touch, I hit up epicurious.com and found this recipe for a nice salad dressing.
