Homemade Barley Bread & Butter

So the other day Sam and Porter were talking about what it was like for the pioneers without electricity and it sparked this idea that Sam had to make flour from our Barley food storage and to make butter in a jar to go with it. Sam and Porter used a wheat grinder to make the barley into flour.

I then researched recipes that used barley flour and told Sam that most the recipes called for a mix of barley, wheat and white flours. He wanted to use all barley flour and it was very, very dense bread. I won't share the recipe because we won't be making it that way again but Sam said from now on he wants to have some of this barley flour on hand to use in place of parts of regular flour in recipes. I told him I would try it because barley is really supposed to be very good for you.

We did make the butter by shaking about a pint of Heavy Whipping Cream in a jar for a really long time, about twenty minutes. Sam got it to the point of really thick whipped cream and then we decided to do the rest in the mixer. We threw the contents of the jar in our Kitchenaid mixer, put the splash guard on and set it to high until it separated. Once it got to that stage I drained & reserved the liquid (which is buttermilk to use for another recipe) and rinsed the butter and kind of patted it dry. If you have cheesecloth you can put the contents in there and squeeze out the liquid but we didn't have any on hand. Anyway, I then added some salt, to taste and the end result was SUPER yummy, creamy butter that made the SUPER dense barley bread yummy. When we put it on the table Carter said "that looks like butter". I think he was a little confused that we had made it but he sure couldn't keep out of it.

Many of you may have already known how to make your own butter but this was a first for us that surely won't be a last!