Submissions     Contact     Advertise     Donate     BlogRoll     Subscribe                         

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Butter when you need it

By Joseph Parish

During extreme times of crisis and under emergency conditions you can certainly bet that you will not find any sort of butter in your local food stores. Butter will tend to become a valuable commodity in those particular times. You could however order the powdered butter for your emergency food supplies or you can take my advice and can your own butter. These cans of butter are great for those potential emergencies situations when the real thing is simply not available.

Our canned butter would be used just the same as any type of fresh butter whether it be in cooking or in baking. In addition, the canned butter is actually real butter and does not have a modified structure of any sort. I would highly recommend that when butter is on sale that you store up and can the surplus.

It is not difficult in any way to can your own butter. Start out by heating jars in your oven which should be set at approximately 250 degrees. At the same time melt the butter in a sauce pan and boil the lids to sanitize them. I would highly recommend the half pint jelly jars for this project. If you have 7 pounds of butter this would equate to about 16 half pints jars. If you care to make less then drop the proportions accordingly. This basically will provide you with 7 ounces of butter per jar.

Once your butter has started to melt continue to simmer it for an additional five minutes. Make sure that you stir it continuously to prevent it from scorching and developing a burnt taste. At the end of the five minutes fill as many jars as you can. Ladle the butter carefully into each of the jars leaving at least ½ inch of headroom. Place the jar lids and rings in place on your jars and place the jars on a kitchen towel to cool down properly until they are comfortable to handle.

Wait patiently for the lids to seal and then shake them occasionally while they are cooling. Once the jars have cooled sufficiently put them in your refrigerator to harden the butter properly. This next part is very important so make sure to follow these instructions carefully. Start out shaking the jars every five minutes or so and as the butter approaches the temperature of the refrigerator shake them every three min until such time as they are one solid mass. If you do not shake the jars as listed above the butter will tend to separate as it begins to solidify. In the event that this happens you will need to reheat the jars and re-shake them all over again. After about one hour you should be able to remove the jars from the refrigerator and store them as you normally do your other emergency food supplies. The butter that is made this way should last for about three years.

I would actually recommend for food storage purposes that you have both types of butters in your pantry – powdered butter and the canned butter. Powdered butter would be an excellent item for your long term storage requirements whereas the canned butter would actually have a shorter life span.

Copyright @ 2009 Joseph Parish


Original: http://www.survival-training.info/articles9/Butterwhenyouneedit.htm

No comments:

Post a Comment