Your Food Processor Is The Easiest Way To Make Butter. Here's Why

Whether you're slathering it on bread, using it for a baking project, or melting it over a steak or pasta for dinner, life is always going to be better with butter. And while you can find so many delicious options on the grocery store shelves, there's a particular magic to whipping it up from scratch.

Making butter at home is surprisingly simple, and miraculously calls for just one single ingredient — heavy cream. There are a number of ways to make it happen, and while you may have attempted this process using a stand or a hand mixer, or even an old fashioned unmechanized way using a jar, there is one appliance for getting the job done that simplifies and streamlines your dairy conversion — a food processor.

Every method has its pros and cons; a blender can convert your cream into a hot soup, while jar-shaking can prove to be a major workout, for example. But this contraption is an example of butter-making efficiency. In the food processor, your cream can become butter in less than five minutes; it doesn't even require that you possess any serious arm strength, and won't make a mess with the buttermilk byproduct, the way a mixer might. Instead, you'll have fresh and flavorful spread in mere minutes, which you can then customize at will.

Beyond the ease and fun factor of making your own butter, it's a perfect opportunity to infuse some flavor into your spread. There's an easy formula for building your own compound butter which is perfect on steak, but this stuff is also delicious in a ton of other applications.

You can work in some cinnamon and sugar and slather slices of toast or top a pile of pancakes. Add sun-dried tomatoes and thyme to make a butter that will elevate any dinner roll, or can be baked into savory biscuits along with salty cheese. Garlic and herb butter is perfect for serving on top of a seared sirloin, or rubbed into the skin of a roasted chicken before popping it into the oven.

Making butter at home gives you a versatile, customizable ingredient that's impressive and fun. It's also a good way to use up some leftover cream, but do your best to source a quality carton that hasn't been ultra pasteurized (a process that will slow the transformation of your cream into butter, and also hinder the flavor). Once you master these simple method, you may find that you're cranking out fresh-churned butter on a regular basis.