Runners who churn butter on their runs | Hacker News Reader

Runners who churn butter on their runs

runnersworld.com

140 pointsrandycupertino89 comments

This is really funny. My wife and I watched all of New Scandinavian Cooking over a few months and there was an episode where he made butter. It blew our minds at how simple it was. We had no idea!

So we bought a couple of liters of cream (35% fat), put it in the stand mixer and made butter. There's a Serious Eats page about it.

The butter we made was better than what we normally buy. We live in Switzerland so the normal grocery store butter is very good. Our butter had less water in it (you can tell in a frying pan) and more flavor. Plus we take the resulting buttermilk and make ricotta cheese and then we take the leftover whey and make Norwegian cheese (more like fudge). So we get three products from one batch of cream. The butter comes out to be about 20 cents cheaper per 250g than store bought and then the ricotta and "fudge" are free, so financially you come out ahead. The cleanup is a bit of a pain though.

We've also made cultured butter from crème fraiche. It's tasty but even when the crème fraiche is on sale it's still like 2x the cost of using cream so probably not worth it other than gifts and special occasions. We made mandarin sorbet with the sour buttermilk after the crème fraiche butter and that was excellent.

When I tell old Swiss people (people in their 70s/80s) that we make butter they think it's hilarious. They tell me about how when they were kids their parents made their own butter and also at parties/gatherings the parents would give the kids a jar of cream and it was their job to shake it and pass it around until it was butter.

If you have an hour on the weekend and if you have a stand mixer I suggest just trying it. Start with the balloon whisk and when the peaks start forming switch to the paddle watch it because when the butter forms it happens quick and you get a big clump of butter rattling around in the mixer knocking it off balance. It takes maybe 25 minutes and then you have to wash it in ice water, mold it, then clean up. About an hour.

In preschool our teacher brought in a jar of cream that was passed around and everyone took turns shaking it. Then we had buttered bread. I believe this was done for thanksgiving.

Ok we did this in elementary school. They gave us crackers and let us spread the butter we made on it and we ate them. I still have no idea as to the purpose of this exercise.

It was memorable and you learned something at least. :)

We did a similar exercise to make ice cream during summer camp in the South.

My wife and I have occasionally made our own butter for years now... one thing people always forget to mention is that it goes bad really quickly. The trick is either to cut it up into chunks and freeze most of it and the remainder you keep in the fridge/defrost later will last about 3 days. Or you can add salt after you've done the separation but this does of course mean you now have salted butter... this will last up to two weeks usually.

Why does the homemade butter spoil so quickly?

I'm not sure it does. It seems to last similarly to me when I make my own as long as I make sure to use sterilized containers to make it and such. It isn't as long as margarine which is maybe the comparison? Not sure.

It usually contains significant amounts of milk protein, which contribute to flavor but spoil about as quickly as milk does. Washing the butter thoroughly until well after the water is clear will improve storage time, as will salting the butter and thoroughly drying it.

Doesn't that remove the very milk protein that makes it taste better?

Yes, it's a balance between flavor and storage time. If you plan to use it immediately, unwashed butter is best.

But milk does not spoil in 3 days. Why would the butter?

Natural, organic milk does. What you are probably used to is pasteurized, and treated with short bursts of heat. Since at least 20 years, for almost anything milky which you can find in the refrigerated parts of stores. I'm not talking about the stuff which doesn't need to be cooled, until opened, that's heated even longer, and pasteurized harder.

What? Raw milk doesn't expire in 3 days either. More like 2 weeks. And butter unlike cheese has no problem being made from pastueurized milk, so I'm not sure why you'd bring that up.

I've brought that up in response to milk doesn't go bad that fast. Which is against my experience. Maybe I should have that defined more precise?

Under which storage conditions? Refrigerated? Check. Closed container? Check. Climate? Any time of the year, central Europe. Check. Any time of the year somewhere in the Rockies, on the 'Western Slope', at 2600m altitude. Check. After 3 to 4 days it begins to smell and taste different. After which I won't touch/consume it anymore.

I'd be really interested in the stuff lasting 2 weeks, and the conditions under which that's possible?

edit: Again, not that highly pasteurized, homogenized, otherwise treated stuff, but fresh from the cows udder (let's call this really raw milk, which isn't on shelves anywhere, AFAIK), or only the slightest treatmeant, like 'fully organic/bio', which nowadays has a refrigerated shelf life of something like 2 weeks, there aren't any other options anymore. It's all treated. And that stuff still goes bad after opening in a few days.

When proper raw milk starts to go bad, you can keep it at room temperature for a day or so and get something similar to yoghurt. It was done all the time when I was little. I grew up on a farm; the milk came from another farm in the village by the time I had been born.

That may be the case, but isn't what I meant to say, which was just the (refrigerated) shelf-live of the stuff for drinking, and preparation of other stuff, assuming drinkability of it.

Secondary usage of it for other stuff is another matter.

All I know is that I used to buy raw milk from a local farm and it lasted about 2 weeks in the fridge until it tasted bad. Google suggests it lasts 1-2 weeks. I keep my fridge colder than the recommended settings.

It doesn’t. People have been doing this without refrigeration for a long time. The above poster did not wash off the buttermilk at the end which would cause it to spoil.

When unrefrigerated, they used copious amounts of salt to keep butter from spoiling. So much so that you'd have to first wash the butter (wash the salt away) before using it.

Do you mold it with your hands under running water to wash away the remaining fluids? Doing that and salting it makes it last for many weeks for me. I don’t even know how long it actually lasts, I’ve always eaten it all before it’s gone bad. Making butter is a way of preserving milk, so it should last more than a couple of weeks.

Roughly how much butter do you get from a certain amount of cream?

Our butter prices in NZ are ridiculous right now (as our domestic prices are driven by export prices), so I'm wondering if making it from cream would be slightly more cost effective ( assuming my time has no value lol).

Buy some goats.

Wish I still had the land to run them.

If it's 35% fat in the cream then 350g per liter, theoretically. There's usually a few grams left in the buttermilk after so maybe 300g. Which is fine because the ricotta is better with some fat in it.

We get non-homogenized milk. You get a nice fat layer of super heavy cream on the top of the bottle. It's ideal for tons of things. I mix it directly into my oatmeal and my mashed potatoes.

I've read (but have not tried) that it's possible to ferment cream with kefir grains, or yogurt, and use the resulting ferment to make cultured butter. There are creme fraiche recipes that are just cream and buttermilk also. For clarity: by buttermilk, I mean the fermented stuff that is found in stores, not just the leftover liquid from churning unfermented cream.

I've fermented milk with yogurt and crème fraiche but this was for something else - a type of cheese. If you're making butter you have to look at the fat content. Butter is milk fat. So you can directly calculate how much butter you can get from the starting product based on the fat %.

i've made cultured butter. you want to use the correct strain. i buy a buttermilk culture specifically

> It blew our minds at how simple it was.

It's a problem when you are making whipped cream. You start as usual and decide to keep whipping just a little more, then suddenly your whipped cream get's transformed into butter.

“So, are you exercising much?”

“Oh yes doc, I get out for a run most days of the week.”

“Wonderful news, got to look after your heart.”

“Yeah, and with my new butter churning bags, not only do I get to stay fit, but I also consume ungodly amounts of butter!”

“Sorry what”

Eating butter is good for your heart. As long as your triglycerides and HDL (AKA "good cholesterol") are low, elevated LDL (AKA "bad cholesterol") is associated with lower all-cause mortality.

I think you got that mixed up.

I think he is being facetious

I've spent enough time around keto people to invoke Poe's law on that one.

And you’d be right. I have linked a study supporting my claim above, you’re welcome to tell me why it’s invalid.

Have done so! It’s basically just what I said - signs point to reverse causation.

Maybe in some cross sectional or cohort studies with poor adjustment models we might see such a signal? Several states of poor health drive LDL down because of those diseases (e.g. having cancer can result in lower LDL, having a heart attack can massively lower LDL), so if we look at study designs that don’t take this into consideration, it can appear that high LDL is protective because of reverse causation.

However, I’m not aware of any evidence that takes this into account showing higher LDL associated with lower ACM. What’s your evidence for such a claim?

“… higher TC and LDL-C were independently and paradoxically associated with lower risk of all-cause mortality and longer survival time in men”

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Yeah, this is a good example of what I’m talking about - you take a bunch of people at risk of diseases that lower LDL-c as a result of having that disease.

They actually acknowledged that reverse causation is a risk here and so ran a sensitivity analysis by excluding patients with less than 5 years of follow up (a nice way of saying “patients who died within 5 years of the LDL-c reading”), the idea being that if these results were likely being driven by reverse causation, you’d expect to see an attenuation of the results.

I’d point out that even if we didn’t, five years is a bit of a weird cutoff - plenty of LDL-c lowering diseases take much longer to kill the average person. Moot point though, because excluding those participants attenuated the result to the degree that the association with LDL-C and mortality became statistically insignificant.

Quite why the authors said “we’re aware that reverse causation is a risk factor, let’s run a test to check if it’s likely influencing the results” and then completely ignored the fact the results suggested it was influencing the findings, is anyone’s guess.

So yeah, basically huge confounder seems to be in play that likely explains the “paradox”.

Thanks I genuinely appreciate your input

Welcome! Thanks for being pleasant.

This is amazing but even as a runner who loves to make my own "processed" food this really reads like a submarine article for the dairy industry.

"I used to be vegan, but you know I just can't liveeeeeeee without that real butter!!!!!!!"

The idea of butter being good doesn't strictly seem like it demands a conspiracy theory.

The implication is that the lack of good butter made someone abandon veganism … while possible, it seems unlikely?

I've known people abandon veganism (for vegetarianism) over cheese, since it's such a common ingredient in restaurant food. Butter feels a little less likely.

Not if you've ever had good butter* on good bread*.

* - which most American's haven't. I realize this sounds like needless shade, but it's very true.

Wonderbread is cake. And The Cake Is A Lie.

Unless they were just using it as an example because they were asked about butter!

Butter is high in saturated fats which are bad for you. It is also very calorie dense. Eating a lot of calorie dense foods makes it difficult to control your weight.

It's probably better than margarine but I wouldn't describe it as a health food.

N=1, but I’ve been doing low carb paleo for 15+ years, from about age 20 to my current late 30s. I live off of butter, tallow, and lard. My weight has only crept up when I’ve eaten a lot of processed food. I get quite lean even with high fat if I fast more frequently or dip into ketosis. I’m trying to pack on some extra muscle with weight lifting right now and it’s not easy to get enough clean calories short of eating spoonfuls of (happy, pastured) bacon grease.

All I’m trying to say is that butter isn’t the enemy. Maybe commercial dairy production practices are the enemy, won’t argue with that.

> I’m trying to pack on some extra muscle with weight lifting right now and it’s not easy to get enough clean calories short of eating spoonfuls of (happy, pastured) bacon grease.

I thought I was the only one with that issue! I'm not paleo but my diet is heavy on whole foods, salads, and I don't eat much in carbs so once I started weight lifting, getting enough calories during the bulking phase has always been a struggle.

Protein is pretty easy by just chugging a few protein shakes a day, but calories? I had to start drowning my salads in olive oil and trying to sneak it or avacado oil or butter into every dish I cooked. A stick of butter only has like 800 calories!

I highly recommend the book Running Weight. Despite the title, it's useful for all kinds of athletes.

Problem with eating lots of animal fats isn't necessarily weight gain, but increased risk of ASCVD from raised LDL-c/ApoB. Can't really see/feel that until you keel over with an MI.

>N=1

I do wonder if you keto people are storing up problems for your later life.

Some people call themselves vegans but will still use animal products that they feel are ethical. Also, some vegans do occasionally use animal products just because they want to.

I don’t think it’s a conspiracy but it’s weird that the vegan topic even came up in this article because it is immaterial to the main topic.

I think about 90% of the time veganism has come up in conversations I've been a part of, it's been unrelated to the main topic being discussed.

Regardless of the vegan part the point still stands. It was also my first though reading the article before I came here to read the comments.

Good competition for Fatih Karakaya (@runners_pie)!

https://www.instagram.com/p/DCuSImnocL7 (November 23, 2024)

> Fatih is a master pastry chef and marathon runner, and he baked a Sachertorte during his marathon at the Ring Running Series at the Hockenheimring.

> Fatih ist Konditormeister und Marathonläufer und hat während seines Marathons bei den Ring Running Series am Hockenheimring eine Sachertorte gebacken.

Of course she's from Oregon. This is close to the most Oregon activity imaginable.

You know, I don't mean this to be rude in any way, but what kept going through my mind as I read this was "I wonder if they drive a Subaru Outback."

And then I clicked the Instagram link and I'm almost positive that is a hunter green Subaru Outback.

This is probably how butter was invented in the first place - some herdsman in the Neolithic who ran somewhere with a skin full of milk, and went “hey this ain’t bad” at the resulting product.

Also yogourt. And cheese. And alcohol.

Are there other cool things to discover?

"Jacob Arnold, 30, a sterile processing tech"

Is his ability to bear children important to the story?

Heh, I roll my natural peanut butter jar on my treadmill to mix it (when the pace is slow.)

the next fad fringe sport.

seriously, if you can do butter, you should also be able to do ice cream, with some ingenuity.

There's a guy (insta: trailswithzach) that did successfully make ice cream like this

Naw, you make Ice Cream on car wheels. Everyone knows that

Here you go, my friend - ice cream running. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO68DWmDcON/?

TIL - next time I go to the dolomites, I might seriously try this; ice cream after 6-8 hours of hiking and via ferrata sounds wonderful.

I make my own butter every now and again. The churning part is easy. The time-consuming part is squeezing out all the buttermilk from the butter. This isn’t mentioned at all in the article.

From the headline, I thought this was going to be about new mothers who’re breastfeeding/lactating accidentally churning butter during their runs. Glad that’s not the case.

> “It was probably 40 degrees outside, but there’s a lot of heat going on in the back,”

Would this is safe to do on a sunny warm weather? Would body heat plus the sun ruin the cream?

On warmer days you could swap doing the washing for food preparation!

> This tracks with the science; according to Scientific American, room-temperature cream turns to butter much faster than cold cream because the molecules move more quickly at higher temperatures. Of course, if the temperature gets too high, everything will just melt, so their experiment probably wouldn’t have worked on a summer run.

Cold cream becomes whipped cream. colder yet icecream.

I assume they shamelessly were talking in Fahrenheit degrees.

> Would this is safe to do on a sunny warm weather? Would body heat plus the sun ruin the cream?

It's fairly safe. You can leave dairy products unrefrigerated for an uncomfortable amount of time :) Butter, in particular, can last for days outside a fridge.

The bacteria that tends to infest dairy products will usually (but not always) turn it into something tasty like yogurt.

Don't get me wrong, you can definitely get sick from spoiled dairy products, but it's not a 100% thing.

> Butter, in particular, can last for days outside a fridge.

I live in Ireland, and once we take butter out of the fridge (to replace the one that's now gone), it doesn't go back in, whatever the weather. All butter here is basically of Kerrygold quality (I'm talking real butter of course).

That's basically how we treated butter while I grew up. So long as it's salted, it rarely goes bad outside the fridge. We had a butter dish and that was about it. The cover keeps the butter from turning a darker yellow and drying out. But we'd still eat it even when that happened.

Gotta be honest, though, I'm not a fan of grassy dairy products :). I had dairy cows growing up and in the spring their milk definitely took on a distinct grassy flavor. I personally preferred it more when it was primarily hay flavored. Store milk tastes like basically nothing in particular.

Yes, also in Ireland and while I wouldn't leave homemade butter out for more than a day or two, Kerrygold salted will last two weeks at 19C without issue.

Yeah we keep butter in a butter dish in the cupboard, refill from the fridge as it is used up. I never knew this wasn’t what everyone did until my roommate in college was blown away about how good the butter was this way.

> Would this is safe to do on a sunny warm weather?

I’d be more concerned about having plastic bags against my skin when I’m sweating heavily than the effect the heat would have on the butter tbh. Hot weather is an excuse to wear less clothing, not wrap yourself in ziploc bags

Did I miss it… the baggies contents would separate into butter and buttermilk, right? Not really ideal for trailside consumption.

- brings a big question

- what are the other things that we dont know of that can be done while running?

I laughed - but I don't want more of this

You don't want more of this on Hacker News?

I don't want more of this on Hacker News. I laughed because it was like ricklolling - but I am kind of curious what was the value so many people found in this article.

What the heck is corn juice honey butter?

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