Hello All!

Has anyone really made goat butter? I have read the archives and many many questions but everyone seems to defer or refer the question to another forum or location. I grew up making water-buffalo butter with a hand egg beater and a mixing bowl with the cream that rose to the top after boiling the milk to kill TB. I bout 2 lactating goats this year and since we switched to using their milk for the family, thought we could use the cream to make butter. Not as simple as the old water-buffalo! We invested in a cream separator when my hubbie informed me I the cream has to be separated out. Well the cream we got was the consitancy of half&half not whipping cream and such a small amount that I would have had to save up for days in the hopes of making butter. So...is this a reality? Thanks! Darlene

-- Darlene in western WA (tomdarsavy@cs.com), November 04, 2001

Answers

Oh, sure, I've made goat's milk butter for years. It's really no harder than making cow's milk butter.

It sounds like you need to adjust your seperator, though. It's got a cream set screw on the bowl (if it's anything like any other cream seperators I've seen) that regulates how heavy or light the cream is, and by tightening it ever so slightly you should be able to get the cream you want.

And be sure you're running warm milk (95°F or so) through the seperator, or you won't get all the cream.

Other than that, how much cream you get is dependent on the breed of goat you milk, and how they're fed. And realize that running a gallon of either cow or goat milk through a seperator is not going to get you much cream, but you can freeze what you get until you save enough to churn.

But wherever were you raised that you milked water buffalo? I didn't think that water buffalo had been in this country all that long.

-- Julia (charmer24@juno.com), November 04, 2001.

I have made goat milk butter in the past. It does take a few days to let the cream come to the top of the bowl when in the fridge but you can do it !! Of course I have only done a small amount at a time but it was easy doing it this way. I just take the cream after a few days and put it into a pint size mason jar. Then shake..shake..shake..for probably 30 minutes or so. Just pass the jar around to family members and it will make a pretty good butter for the table. No huge amount ...but it does work. Good Luck !!

-- Helena Di Maio (windyacs@ptdprolog.net), November 05, 2001.

I was wondering about the comment of letting the milk sit in the frig several days to let the cream separate out. We don't have a separator, and no money to buy one for a while. Are you having to use pasturized milk to do this?

-- james Shackelford (jdshackelf@aol.com), February 11, 2002.

james, yes.......to really get the wonderful sweet goat's milk butter without a separator IMO you need to pasturize the milk. I have never been happy with my butter if it was not made from pasturized cream. I don't recall seeing this particular question posted or I would have responded. Obviously Darlene's separator was not working appropriately and I hope that she got better results as time passed.

It has been my experience that my goat's milk butter was more "tender" and required more working than cow's milk butter to get all the buttermilk rinsed out. Without that work I found it soured rather quickly and was not to my liking. I work mine with paddles under cold, slowly running, water until I am satisfied that I have all the butter milk worked out of it. Then I lightly salt and work it all over again as I find the salting brings the very last of the butter milk out.

-- diane (gardiacaprines@yahoo.com), February 11, 2002.