Homemade Butter & Tortillas

In a recent post I said I wanted to make my own butter and flour tortillas along with a couple other things and anything else I can figure out. In fact I plan to make homemade bread this Sunday by hand. The reason I am doing these things is to learn how and experience them so I know how to do them. They'll be under my belt, and I can say "yeah, I know how to do that." That's pretty much why. It might not save any money, but it gives you knowledge and peace. There's nothing better than that! I can choose whenever I want to make them or whenever I want to buy them from the store. Now that I've done tortillas and butter I know that there are pros and cons. But I'll explain those as we go along the process with pictures here.

BUTTER

This is all you need for the butter. I filled the jar 1/3 full of the cream and shook it like a dog for about 20 minutes. It was a work out. It would be good to have a few extra people on hand. But, by yourself it is totally doable.

It slops around until it becomes silent, at that point you have whipped cream, keep shaking, and it will suddenly change to slopping once again and that's the point where a glop of butter will be sloshing around in a liquid, which is buttermilk. Drain out the buttermilk and clean the butter by putting water in the jar and shaking (with the butter still inside) a few times til the water runs clear. Here's a con: The butter is not hard really so to try and smash the buttermilk out of it doesn't really work well. Next big Con: For all of that hard shaking and time and annoying squeezing the buttermilk out of it, look how much butter I got when it was all said and done. I felt like Ralphy on The Christmas Story "Son of a B****!" It was sad. I thought maybe it was 2 heaping tablespoons......I mean I probably had enough for 3 slices of toast. There has to be a way to really get some butter that you can use throughout the week but it said to use a jar you can easily hold in a hand to shake. I mean I can't really see myself with a gallon jug shaking that thing. Maybe if you had more people you could do that. I had no wax paper, great planning on my part so I took a store bought butter out of the fridge and stole the paper from it. You can clearly see how little butter I had at the end. Did it taste better? Yes it did. That is a Pro. It tasted less processed, and more real and fresh. Some people love butter and can eat it plain. If that's the case you could definitely eat this plain. I have made and tasted real butter in Kindergarten, so I already knew it would taste way better. If anyone out there has an idea of how to make more butter, say a weeks worth, comment below. Btw, the butter molds and gets harder once you refrigerate it.

TORTILLAS

To make homemade tortillas is kind of a mess but who cares, everything is a mess. I'm not trying to make things more convenient, I'm trying to be more self reliant by knowing how to make my own stuff.

It would be good to have a rolling pin. I'll have to get one of those, oh yeah and a pastry cutter too. Without those things it was still possible but my tortillas were thicker, almost like Pita bread which has it's benefit...they don't tear and get holes in them. I tried to spread them as thin as I could with my hands without ruining them. I LOVE my George Foreman and grilled them right there on it. Super easy clean up.

The finished tortillas. I used them for a dinner recipe called Chicken Burrito Bundles that are so good. Thanks mom for that recipe, we make it all the time. A lot of my dinner recipes call for tortillas, so it is great to know how to make them when I want to.