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- Have you ever wanted to try one of those fancy butters but thought they were a little too expensive, it's actually really easy to make at home. Butter is just cream with a little less water. Hi, I'm Julie and today on Hungry for Science we're turning one emulsion into another. An emulsion is just one liquid suspended in another. Salad Dressing is a classic example where you have oil suspended in water and vinegar. Cream is another example of emulsion, which is also fat suspended in liquid. Butter is also an emulsion as well, but in butter, it's actually an emulsion of water suspended in fat. It turns out that butter is actually cream with enough water removed, so that fat is the main ingredient. I have some cream here and if I shook this up in a jar long enough, it would turn into sweet cream butter, the main type of butter sold in the United States. I'm interested in making some European butter, some cultured butter, which is butter that has been fermented by bacteria for a few days, which gives it a nice tangy rich flavor. I have some cream here that I added a little buttermilk to about five days ago and I just let it sit on my counter. We're gonna try to separate the water from the fat here and the way we're gonna do that is to smash the fat molecules together until they clump-up and leave the water behind. I'm gonna do that in my food processor, because it's gonna do all the work for me. If you don't have a food processor, you can do this at home by putting a marble in a jar with the cream and shaking really hard, it'll take a little longer but it'll totally work. So here we go, you can see that the cream has thickened a little, that's a byproduct of the fermentation. And I'm just gonna turn this on, take a close look and see if you can notice the changes that happen. Maybe you saw that pretty dramatic change at the end, went from something that seemed like a liquid to solid and a liquid and in fact, that's what we have. We gonna strain this out just so we can see what came out of this. I have some cheesecloth here and a strainer and you can see that I have the solids leftover and that is my cultured butter. So the fat at room temperature once it pumps together, it will become solid and I am going to try to drain as much liquid as possible by just squeezing it through my cheesecloth. And I'm gonna stick this on ice just to chill a little bit, I have an ice water bath right here. Now the liquid left behind looks and smells like buttermilk, it is actually true buttermilk. The buttermilk that I added to my cream that I bought in the store is actually cultured milk it's milk with some added bacteria to it. That's because we don't actually make enough cultured butter in this country to sell to produce enough true buttermilk, but this is true buttermilk that I can actually add to more cream to make more butter down the road. So let's see how the butter turned out. Once this chills for a little while the butter will solidify even more. I'm gonna squeeze out as much water as possible this watery buttermilk is not soluble it does not mix with the butter. And so as you can see I have this nice mound of cultured butter that I can actually squeeze out even more buttermilk from it if I want, I can add salt if you like, spread it on your favorite toast, it'll be much tastier because of bacteria and time.