How does cream go from liquid to whipped to butter AND buttermilk?
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I initially replied to someone else’s comment, but I’ve seen a few different comments now that I think miss the point of what butter is, so I’m going to try a top level comment.
Cream and milk consist of tiny blobs of fat, each surrounded by a thin protective cover, all floating around in a watery base. The blobs of fat are prevented from joining up into bigger blobs by the protective covers.
Whipped ream is made by relatively gently mixing lots of air bubbles into this mixture, without breaking the covers on the fat blobs. Now there are air bubbles, tiny fat blobs, and watery stuff. We can ignore how the bubbles stay in the cream – it’s to do with proteins in the watery but, but it’s not important.
Butter is made by shaking and churning the cream much more vigorously, so that the protective covers around the little fat blobs get broken. With nothing separating them, the blobs of fat now all join together to make a big block of fat (with a little bit of the watery stuff dissolved in it). This is the butter. The buttermilk is the liquid left over after all the fat blobs have joined together.
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