Japans Butter Crisis and being off sick...

As you may or may not know, Japan has a butter crisis. This usually happens at the run up to Christmas, the supermarkets run out of butter, the prices sky rocket and often you are only allowed to buy one pack at a time! I'm not really sure what it is all about, some say there is a milk shortage but that doesn't explain why there is an abundant supply of milk, cheese, yoghurt or ice-cream. 

Anyway, we decided to try our hand at making our own. Ebi-kun had the day off since he wasn't feeling well. After he had had some extra sleep he was feeling up to a bit of experimenting! He put 150ml of 47% cream in a jar and shook it like crazy. Nothing happened, so we added a small cookie cutter and that seemed to do the trick, the fat and the whey separated.

We know that it doesn't always need something inside the jar for this to work, because at the local organic cafe, we make our own butter by just using the jar. I have bought 35% cream this week so we will try with that and see if the results are different.

Next, he drained off the whey (which I used in the soup) and dumped the butter onto the plate.

Cleaning the butter off the cookie cutter was a bit of a pain, a marble would have been much easier! Then he added some salt and mixed it together. Taa-daa butter!

Went really well with the cauliflower cheese soup and freshly baked bread! This is one of my favourite soups, like a hug in a bowl.