Homemade Stand Mixer Butter and Buttermilk

This stand mixer butter is my new favorite way to use up leftover heavy cream. How easy is it to make butter with a stand mixer? So easy I figured out how to do it the first time based on a vague memory of seeing someone do it once on a TV show and absolutely zero additional research.

Of course I've since done a bunch of research and tested different methods and techniques. But my point still stands! If you have a stand mixer and some heavy cream, you can make stand mixer butter in about 10 minutes. It's incredible. It feels like doing magic.

I'm obsessed. So I'm dragging you into my butter obsession too.

Once you start making your own butter from scratch you won't be able to stop. Soon you'll be making all sorts of fun, flavored compound butters like this easy whipped honey butter or this roasted garlic and chive butter!

Whether you leave it plain or add lots of flavor, this homemade butter is so good slathered on a freshly baked slice of my no-knead dutch oven bread and sprinkled with flaky salt.

Why Make Homemade Butter

Any time I see a recipe call for like, 2 tablespoons of heavy cream, I cringe a little. Heavy cream can be expensive! Trying to find other things to do with it before it goes bad can be... tricky.

Sure, you can use up excess heavy cream in your coffee or to make whipped cream, but ice cream isn't exactly quick. And whipped cream has an even shorter shelf life! So that's only a useful option if you've got something to put whipped cream on immediately. Like ice cream. So now you're back where you started.

Homemade butter, however, is fast, requires no additional ingredients, and is super versatile. It stays good in the fridge for a few weeks and freezes well, too.

Of course you can also make butter using a jar like you did in elementary school, but if you've got a stand mixer that can do the work for you...? I know what I'm choosing.

One other perk of making homemade butter, by the way? The byproduct of homemade butter is buttermilk. Which is also expensive and can be hard to find in the store. For the price of one pint of heavy cream, you get butter and buttermilk? What a win!

The art of making butter is ancient — at least 4,000 years old! So you're joining a very long tradition in a very newfangled way by making butter in your fancy-shmancy stand mixer. And trust me, our ancestors are extremely jealous.

Ingredients and Tools

• Heavy cream - aka Heavy Whipping Cream. Full-fat. Not light cream, not half and half, not whole milk. Real heavy cream. I've used pasteurized and ultra-pasteurized, and both work just fine.
• Ice water - This prevents the butter from melting while you rinse any remaining buttermilk particles off of it. Make sure you have plenty of ice before you get started, it melts faster than you think.
• Fine sea salt - Optional! If you want to make salted butter, the fine grains of sea salt will flavor the butter without making it grainy.
• Stand mixer with whisk attachment - I used a 5 quart tilt-head KitchenAid mixer for this because my big 7 qt mixer bowl is a bit big for this small amount of heavy cream. You can use a hand mixer, but you need to be mixing on high speed for a long time so make sure your arm is ready for that kind of workout!
• A wire spider - You don't need one of these but I found it was much easier to pick smaller pieces of butter out of the ice bath with the help of the wire spider.

How to Make Butter Using a Stand Mixer

There are a lot of different ways to make homemade butter out there — and there are even several different stand mixer butter methods out there. As I was developing this recipe and trying different techniques and processes, I pulled together a method that works very well for me.

The first time I tried making butter I was super impatient and thought it wasn't working because it was taking forevvvver (it wasn't) and I stopped the mixer about 30 seconds before it would have fully separated. I don't want that to happen to you. So I've got step-by-step photos so you'll know exactly what to look for.

The first step of making butter is to let the heavy cream sit out at room temperature for at least 30 minutes before you get started. This encourages the cream to separate.

You don't want the heavy cream to be warm, but the closer it is to room temperature when you start whisking it, the faster it will separate and turn into butter.

By the way... you won't see it in these photos, but I always use a mixing bowl shield when making butter. Most KitchenAid mixers come with one; it's that plastic thing that clips around the top of the bowl. The heavy cream splashes a lot at the beginning and again at the end of the butter-making process; the shield helps contain the mess.

If you don't have a bowl shield, tent aluminum foil around the rim of your bowl or stretch plastic wrap across the top of the bowl with a hole in the middle for the whisk to move around. Draping a large kitchen towel over the top of your mixer also works.

First, the heavy cream whips up into fluffy whipped cream. But when you keep going, it starts to break apart and becomes yellowish and kind of grainy. The butter will start clinging to the walls of the bowl. You might even hear or see small amounts of buttermilk sloshing in the bottom of the bowl.

Keep going! It's not butter yet.

You'll actually be able to see the moment it becomes butter happen before your eyes. The butter will start coming off the sides of the bowl; you'll hear a lot more buttermilk splashing, and the butter will collect inside the whisk. This happens in a span of about 15-20 seconds. And you'll definitely want to have a bowl shield in place when it does!

You *Must* Rinse Your Butter in Ice Water

Rinsing the butter is crucial. You really don't want any buttermilk particles to get trapped in the butter, because they can cause it to go rancid! Yuck. Ice water is the best for rinsing the butter since it keeps it firm so it doesn't melt into the water.

When you first scrape the butter out of the whisk into the ice bath, break the butter up into smaller pieces so they get rinsed quite well. The water will quickly become cloudy. Use a wire spider to gather the butter pieces up on a paper towel and empty and refill the ice bath.

Repeat, this time using a spatula to smush and fold and break apart the butter in the ice water, then reform it into a ball. Remove it from the water, refresh the ice water, and repeat until the water runs clear. This usually takes about 3-4 rinses for me.

Once the water runs clear, gather the butter back up in a clean paper towel and squeeze well to press out any excess water.

It's better to use a few large ice cubes in your ice bath than to use lots and lots of small ice cubes. Do as I say, not as I do. In the photos above I have way too many ice cubes in my bowl. Usually I use one or two of these big round cocktail ice cubes, but I was making so much butter in testing and shooting this recipe that I bought a bag of ice for these photos without thinking about how ice size would change the process.

You want to rinse the butter very well to remove any remaining buttermilk particles. And trying to scoop up small pieces of butter without trapping any tiny shards of ice in the butter isn't easy!

📖 Recipe