Actually there are two kinds of butter. All butter sold in the stores is sweet cream butter. The same as if you whipped cream alone into butter. that's because old timers and pioneers made sour cream butter. there is a difference. I still churn butter sometimes in a brown glazed 200 year old churn. This is the way you get REAL buttermilk. When you merely whip cream to make sweet cream butter all you get besides the butter is whey....no buttermilk.
To make old fashioned butter and buttermilk--------
Put two gallons of whole milk (not pastuerized) in the churn. Let it sit out in the kitchen until it will comes away from the side in one blob when the churn is tipped. It will be clabbered. About a day. Don't let it go past that time or it will get too sour. It will take about thirty minutes to churn into butter. Just the up and down sloshing of the dasher which is easy work.
The old timers here who taught me to make the real thing sang a sing-songey tune that went----
"Come butter come, come butter come,
Johnny's at the garden gate waiting for a butter cake."
It is sung over and over to the beat of the dasher until the butter "comes." My children used to love to sing the song and try to guess how long it would take. Doesn't make the butter come any faster, but it does pass the time and helps with the rhythm needed for the dasher. It will clump up on the dasher much like it clumps on a wire whisk when doing sweet cream butter.
I usually get about one pound of butter and one and a half gallons of real butter milk. The buttermilk will have little yellow flects of butter in it. The butter will still have to be washed, but it has a flavor somewhere between butter and sour cream.
When I was milking all the time and the old timers aroung here found out I made real butter and buttermilk I could hardly keep up with the demand. Bought all the appliances in my kitchen with that and then some.
If you don't have fresh whole milk straight from the cow you can duplicate it by pouring two gallons of pasturized milk in the churn and add two quarts of whipping cream on top. You won't have any butter fat coming from the pasteurized milk as it has been permanantly(homoginized) incorporated in the milk and so have to add the whipping cream. Repeat the clabbering. The results are about the same, but the buttermilk you get from this method is what would be called "cultured" buttermilk. Still beats the store boughten stuff.
Hope if you don't have a crockery churn I hope you buy one for when we're all off the grid. I've always loved doing this. Kinda like doing magic.
Erma Bombeck used to say, " the car keys and the checkbook set me free." I always said, "A cow and a churn set me free."
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