For sometime now I have been trying to make the perfect Bacon Sandwich, and the way to do this as I see it,is to control as many of the ingredients as you can. Get that right and it has to work. Already I make the bread, in an oven I built, I cure the bacon, smoke it in my smoke house, and fry it over a wood fire in a frying pan I made. The brown sauce is home made, and most of the ingredients are grown in garden. The last piece of the Jigsaw was the butter, until today, shop bought.

My dearly beloved knows me well and as a present today gave me a set of butter paddles and a pot of cream. What more do you need. 20 minutes later we had our first pat of home made butter, and it certainly wont be the last. It was good, really good and yet so simple. All you need is a pot of double cream, a food mixer and some salt.

Place the cream in a bowl and whip as you would if you were whipping cream, but keep going past the whipping stage until it starts to separate, and keep going for a bit longer. The cream separate’s, the liquid is buttermilk so drain it off and save it, you can use it for all sorts of cooking. The solid is the basis of butter, what you then need to do is rinse out all the remaining butter milk, so fill a bowl with ice cold water, and put the solids in it, squeeze it and work it to wash out the remaining butter milk, change the water and do it again, and again until the water remains clear. That way you have got rid of the butter milk and so the butter lasts longer.  Dry off the butter solid, place it on a wooden chopping board & squeeze out any remaining butter milk. If you like salted butter this is the time to add it working it into the solid, shape it and its ready.

From start to finish its 20 minutes, probably the easiest thing I have ever made. I can imagine if you have a young child to help this would be the ideal project. Try it and see for yourself