Christmas Miracle, Now Featuring Goat

What? You don’t feature goats in your miracles? Perhaps you should talk to Aberforth about that.

As you know, we gather with Summer and Brandon each year to make butter. Brandon says it’s not Christmas until the butter happens, and Summer calls it a Christmas Miracle. Both are accurate in this household. But, since discovering I can’t have cow dairy, I’ve not enjoyed the fruits of our shaking for years now. This year the co-op I’m part of had a goat milk co-op going on for awhile. I was never able to participate for a few reasons – for one thing, it wasn’t close to me. For another thing, I can only handle so much goat before I get very grumpy at everyone. Since I’m the only one in the house eating goat products it wasn’t worth it to me for what small amount I’d order. Still, it inspired me to see if I could find some goat cream somewhere to try to make butter out of.

But before I knew it, I only had a few days left before Butter Day so I asked around to find out what, if anything, I could get to make this happen. I was first told that goat’s milk is naturally homogenized so it’s difficult to get cream from. And then, just as I opened my milk to find it topped with a thick cheesy substance, an email came through informing me that, if left alone in the fridge, it will separate and perhaps I could scrape the cream off and try with that? Which is exactly what we did. I did transfer the milk to a mason jar to make the harvesting of the cream easier.

So, when Butter Day finally arrived, we filled one jar with some heavy (cow) whipping cream, and put the goat’s milk cream into a separate jar. It was a very small amount. Next year, I will try to find a source for actual goat cream so we can have a decent amount of butter. We added pink Himalayan salt to each jar because: hey! fancy!

And then we shook the jars. I used a lot of salt this year (I never measure anything so don’t ask) and it all happened very quickly so I don’t know if it was the amount or the minerals specific to the Himalayan salt. The cow butter was a lovely yellow, and the goat was pure white. The goat butter had a different texture to it. It was quite fluffy, as though it was whipped. It had separated from the buttermilk the way that happens when dairy performs its miraculous transformation from whipped cream to butter, but it was still quite fluffy. It also coated the sieve and made it more difficult to drain than the cow butter.

Summer had made gluten-free chai pumpkin bread (she takes good care of me!) to put under the butters and it was heavenly. Once all the important photography was taken care of, we dug in. I’m still not completely sure if we shook the goat butter enough, or if it simply has a different consistency, but either way it was delicious. And we are doing this every year from now on.