With butter prices slipping through our fingers, we took matters into our own hands. 

Every day it feels like there’s a new headline about Aotearoa’s butter price blowout. With Stats NZ reporting a 65% price hike since February last year, a block of butter is slipping out of reach for many, with the rise unlikely to melt away anytime soon. People are lining up at Costco to bulk buy blocks of slightly cheaper butter, with one man even driving 750km to fill his van with the stuff. And it’s putting pressure on cafes around the country, with some forced to hike their cheese scone price up to a whopping $8, and others resorting to buying butter from Australia.

It got us thinking: would it be cheaper to make butter yourself at home? How hard can it really be? And will it taste just as good as Costco’s finest? 

Alex Casey tried the shaking method

My recipe for homemade butter came from The Stay at Home Chef, whose promise of “a fun old-fashioned activity for kids” seemed achievable even for me, an adult who once let a whole unopened bag of frozen corn melt onto the sizzling hot element because I got distracted on my phone. The only prep required was picking up 300ml of fresh cream from Pak’nSave Riccarton for just $3.25, digging out an old jar from the garage, and washing the spider corpses out. 

As I watched the arachnid exoskeletons circle the drain, I felt a sense of old world charm seep in. There was no electricity or machinery needed here, and no fancy chemicals or additives apart from good old fashioned elbow grease. I diligently poured one cup of cream into the jar, twisted it shut, and began to shake with reckless abandon. Alas, within seconds of vigorous motion, I was splattered with cream (not accepting any blue humour at this time). 

With the jar safely secured with packing tape, I settled in again to listen to a 5.02 minute long voice note from a friend while doing my first round of shaking (the Stay at Home Chef promised five to seven minutes). About 20 seconds in, my right arm started to ache and I had to swap to the left. This went on for a while, until I settled on using both hands and shaking from side to side like an excited trophy winner, and then back and forth in front of me like I was doing high speed netball passes.

As the voice note finished, I was delighted to hear no more sloshing in the jar. Could it be that I had just made butter in half the time of the ‘All Too Well’ 10-minute version? I sliced through the sellotape feeling like Old Mother Hubbard, but was crestfallen to find nothing but whipped cream within. I ate a conciliatory teaspoon, and got back to work. 

The next voice note I shook my way through was eight minutes long (my friend is fine) and by the end of it I heard a satisfying “THONK” inside the jar. The contents had separated into a thin white cloudy liquid housing what can only be described as a bright yellow brain within. I strained it all through the sieve and was delighted to find a near perfect sphere of butter waiting to be mooshed into a small bowl with a bit of salt and garnished with parsley. This is the 90s after all. 

I burnt a piece of Vogel’s to a crisp and slathered it from coast to coast in my luxury hand shooketh butter. It was delicious, creamy, just like from the shop but possibly even better because of the delectable analog smugness. All in all, I got about 78 grams of butter from my 250ml of cream (minus the sleeve spill and the conciliatory teaspoon of cream) which means I’d be spending $20.80 to make my own 500g block (which is not the projected price until August). 

Daylight robbery you cry, but there is hidden value here. Consider the free arm workout, the free science extravaganza, free buttermilk, and free 50ml of leftover cream. The next morning I made two pancakes with the leftover buttermilk, served with leftover (jar whipped) cream, and of course my own melted homemade butter. It was a turducken of dairy products that had gone farm to plate, nose to tail, liquid to solid and all the way back again. A priceless bit of fun in a bleak ass world. 

Anna Rawhiti-Connell tried the KitchenAid method

I set the task of making butter with my KitchenAid for myself, confident it would be easier than Alex’s shaker method. Bridget Jones famously described married people as “smug marrieds”. I am describing KitchenAid owners as smug KitchenAiders. When someone comments on something impressive you’ve made with a KitchenAid, you can’t just take the compliment, you have to say you made it with a KitchenAid, but you’re allowed to pretend you’re saying that to highlight it’s no big deal to make homemade pasta when you are aided by precision engineering. Those are the rules of KitchenAid club.

KitchenAid’s “recipe” for butter is cheerfully titled “Homemade Butter – Colour of the Year 2025”. It’s a) a Pantone-esque announcement about their colour of the year and b) a sales pitch for their cheerful and accidentally bleak-sounding colour range, described as a “soft, energising butter yellow with a creamy satin finish”. Like butter, I guess?

I woke up yesterday morning, my butter-making task on my list, and promptly handed half the job off to my husband by asking him to get some cream on his way back from the gym. “Why?” he said “Work” I replied. He nodded wearily, knowing it would be for some cockamamie experiment that my type A personality couldn’t resist partaking in. I’d said I needed a 330ml bottle of MeadowFresh cream to match Alex’s cream “for science”. He wearily said there wasn’t any and wearily put a 500ml bottle of Anchor cream in the fridge. The experiment has been corrupted and has already cost me $4.84 and a spousal favour backlog.

I poured 330ml of cream into my KitchenAid bowl along with half a teaspoon of salt. One KitchenAid recipe I googled mentioned a “whipping disc”. I don’t have a whipping disc. I panicked for a brief second before returning to the first KitchenAid butter recipe I’d found the day before which just used the standard whipping attachment. I don’t know why there are so many “recipes” for something made of cream and centrifugal force.

The recipe advised it would take 10-15 minutes for the butter fat solids to separate from the buttermilk. I’d half read a message from Alex the night before about how long it took her to make butter using just her arms and a jar and was immediately crestfallen because I thought she’d said seven minutes. I’ve just read her butter odyssey properly and my zest for life has returned.

The KitchenAid recipe advised slowly dialling up the machine from one to turn-it-up-to-11, Vin Diesel speed. From cream to separated fat and buttermilk, it took eight minutes to get butter. I drained it in a sieve as per the instructions and rinsed it a few times with cold water to rid it of the last of the buttermilk. Voilà, le beurre! 

The magic of making something you have spent your life assuming required a gigantic industrial manufacturing process and the feeling of pretending you’re sticking it to Big Dairy are enough to make the extremely dodgy economics of this endeavour worth it. I got 86 grams of butter from 330ml of cream. To make 500 grams of butter would have cost me $28.13, so it makes zero fiscal sense. I suspect the mixer approach, while faster, also wastes more cream by the time you lose the precious fats of our land to the bowl, the wall, your face, a spatula and a sieve.

The butter was taste-tested by my colleagues yesterday, who praised it after spreading it on bread and putting that into a toasted sandwich press. I can confirm without the mask of a toastie, it tastes like butter, and I feel like a science wizard. A+++ would make it again if I won Lotto or owned a cow.