Daz in the Kitchen: Making butter and buttermilk scones ... all done in the Thermomix!!

Thursday, July 31, 2014

Making butter and buttermilk scones ... all done in the Thermomix!!

The Thermomix is indeed a rather marvelous machine and the more I use it, the more I love it. There just doesn't seem to be much it can't do ... okay, it can't bake and it can't slow cook, but short of that ... it can do most things.

One weekend, a little while ago, I got very ambitious and adventurous. I decided that I wanted to make my own butter and also then use the buttermilk resulting from that to make buttermilk scones ... why waste? It was an ambitious day, because I also made my own jam and whipped cream in the Thermomix but that's for another post on another day.

I looked around the interwebz for recipes for butter and found this marvelous YouTube video with instructions on how to make butter. I watched the video several times to get a good grasp of it, as I was rather nervous about the whole butter making thing, and also found a written recipe that I was able to print out and follow. I can't remember precisely where I found the original recipe as I do not have it written down (I'm sorry!!) but here it is anyway.

RECIPE for butter:

Ingredients:

600g pure cream (not thickened cream!!)

Instructions:

Insert the butterfly and measure in the cream:

600g pure cream (make sure it's pure cream - thickened cream may not work)

Whip on speed 4 until it separates into butter and buttermilk. It will start to bump around, so stay near your machine and turn it off after a couple of seconds of 'bumping'. It usually takes only a minute or two, but I have had older cream take up to 5 minutes.

Strain the buttermilk by pouring it through the strainer/rice basket into a bowl. Squeeze the butter well with the spatula (against the side of the bowl) to get out as much of the buttermilk as you can. The buttermilk is lovely to bake with in scones, breads, cakes and pancakes (if you can have dairy), so don't throw it out!

Remove the butterfly from the bowl and pour about 500g icy cold water over the butter. Mix it on speed 4 for a few seconds to rinse it. Strain the water off into the sink, pressing the butter against the side of the bowl with the spatula and pouring through the strainer/rice basket again. The butter needs to be rinsed twice, or until the water is clear. If you leave any buttermilk in the butter, it will turn sour more quickly.

Give the butter a good squeeze to get rid of any remaining water. This can be done with the spatula, squeezing the butter against the side of the bowl; or you can wrap a piece of muslin around the butter and squeeze it; or you can just use your hands.

Now make sure the bowl is empty, and weigh the butter back in so you know how much you have. Then add in that much oil and water.

Eg: If you end up with 300g of butter, add 300g of oil and 300g of water. Also add a little salt if you like. I add a bit less than a teaspoon of salt to this amount of butter, oil and water.

macadamia oil (or olive oil if you like the taste)

filtered water

sea salt/himalayan salt (opt.)

Insert the butterfly, and whip the butter, oil, water and salt on speed 4 for about 20 seconds, or until well combined. Pour into a container and keep in the fridge.

(You do pour it into the container as it is quite a thick liquidy consistency when done, but it does set once it's been in the fridge.)

The butter turned out very well and very smooth. As you can see from the picture, it made two decent sized containers of butter. The butter lasted me about a month in the fridge. Do be careful with the butter and use it up quickly if you can, since it has no preservatives in it, it doesn't last as long as store bought butter.

I didn't put enough salt into the butter, so it was a bit bland. I was being very conservative as I was worried that I would over salt, but I didn't. So just be sure that you check the taste with the amount of salt you add in! You might need to adjust it somewhat.

Also, the macadamia nut oil is very mild, so it doesn't have much flavor at all. If you wanted something a bit more robust in flavor, try olive oil instead.

Next time, I plan on making some garlic and herb butter.

After making the butter, there was a fair bit of buttermilk leftover that resulted from making the butter. Instead of pouring it away, I dug up a recipe for making buttermilk scones and planned for us to have a Devonshire Tea. There was exactly the right amount of buttermilk from the butter for this scone recipe ... lucky me!

Here is the RECIPE that I used for the scones:

Ingredients:

300 grams Self Raising Flour

20 grams raw sugar

1 pinch salt

60 grams Butter, Chilled and cut in cubes

200 grams buttermilk

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 200 degrees (fanforced). Line a baking tray with baking paper.

Place self raising flour, sugar, salt and butter in to TM bowl. 10 seconds/speed 6 or until it resembles breadcrumbs.

Add buttermilk into mixing bowl -1 minute/knead setting or until dough comes together. Lightly flour the bench top and empty the dough out.

Work the dough until it comes together and roll out to about 3cm thick. Use a glass or round cookie cutter to cut out circles around 4cm and place on prepared trays, touching each other. Repeating this until all dough has been used up.

Lightly brush some milk onto top of scones.

Bake for approx 12 minutes or until golden brown. (more like 20 minutes)

Makes 7 regular sized scones

The scones were very easy to make and tasted wonderful. I am definitely doing this again, but if I don't have buttermilk from recently made butter, I will just buy the buttermilk.