Accumulating enough cream to fill your butter churn can take time. Your yield will vary depending on the season and your herd size, so you may want to wait until you have larger amounts of cream. Or, maybe you should’ve made butter before now and just didn’t get to it. Cream will probably sour as it ages, even if it’s been properly refrigerated. Though it’ll still churn properly, aged cream may produce butter with a sourer taste than your family likes.
What steps can you take to prevent this? For our grass-fed Jerseys, a treat of ground oats at milking time helps boost cream production, which also shortens the cream-collecting period. Additionally, the soured flavor of the cream is due to the production of acid. Baking soda is a base, so you can use it to cut down on aged cream’s acidic tang. You can play around a bit with quantities, but as a starting point, I’ve found 1 teaspoon baking soda per 1 gallon cream to be effective. If only a portion of your cream has soured, add baking soda only to the soured part before churning; don’t include all the cream in your calculations on how much baking soda to add. Your freshest cream must be older than 24 hours to churn properly, and your cream must be at the correct temperature to churn and produce butter of a consistency that’s easily washed (which further ensures a good flavor). Though some people report the ideal temperature as between 55 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit, I find 56 to 60 degrees produces the best results and the quickest churn. I’ve
