Why make butter in your kitchen when you can make it on your jogging path?

For home chefs, making your own butter can be a fun, and tasty, little project. And so it was that our Japanese-language reporter Natsuno Futon decided, on a recent afternoon, to whip up a batch. She wasn’t going to set foot into her kitchen to make it, though, and it’s not like she has a dedicated butter-making workshop attached to her home, either.

No, Natsuno was going to try making her butter out on the streets…or, more specifically, the jogging path.

Recently, Natsuno has been hearing buzz, originating in Korea, she says, that you can make your own butter by running with a pack of cream. Curious to see if it really worked, she decided to give it a shot. We should mention that while she enjoys going for long walks and occasionally playing volleyball, Natsuno isn’t a regular jogger, sprinter, or distance runner, so this experiment should give us an answer as to whether or not making butter by running with cream is something that the average person can do, not just specialized athletes.

To do the butter run, you’ll need just two ingredients: fresh cream and salt. For the cream, you’ll want something with a relatively high fat content, at least 35 percent, and just to be on the safe side Natsuno used some 45-percent stuff.

You’ll also need one (or maybe two) Ziploc bags. Ratio-wise, Natsuno poured 200 milliliters (6.8 ounces) of cream into a bag, then added a teaspoon of salt and closed the bag up without really trying to squeeze the air out of it first.

As for the size of the bag, you want something compact enough to carry with you as you run, but you also need to make sure there’s some space inside the bag for the contents to slosh about, since the motion is what, supposedly, is going to turn the cream into butter.

If you’re feeling brave, a single bag will do, but Natsuno was a little apprehensive about the possibility of running around with a bag that had sprung a leak and was spraying cream on her with every stride, so she decided to double-bag it by sticking the first Ziploc inside of a second one.

Then she put the packet of cream and salt into her cross-body pouch…

…strapped that on…

…and started running.

As you can see in the above footage, Natsuno was jogging at a decent pace, but not in a full-out sprint. Similarly, she had the straps on her pouch adjusted so that it would sway and slosh the cream around, but without hanging so loosely as to be flopping and crashing as she moved.

Tracking her progress with a jogging app on her phone, after she’d gone three kilometers (1.9 miles) she stopped to check on her package’s progress.

Oh, wow, look at that! Even after this relatively short distance, the contents of the bag were already starting to separate themselves out into solid and liquid parts. It still hadn’t solidified enough to be called butter, but with just three kilometers traveled, Natsuno had already succeeded at making whipped cream.

But it was butter or bust, so she took a deep breath and got back to running.

The weather, thankfully, was ideal: partly cloudy, warm enough for her muscles to stay nice and loose, but cool enough that she wasn’t roasting under the sun. There were patches of blue sky overhead, and patches of yellow nanohana (rapeseed blossoms) in bloom along the riverbank. Hearing the elegant chirping of birds as she ran, the combination of sights and sounds made for an emotionally cleansing and comforting atmosphere, and Natsuno couldn’t help feeling like all of the positive energy she was carrying her cream through was going to have a similarly positive effect on the results, sort of like when people talk about growing healthy plants while playing classical music for them.

At the five-kilometer (3.1-mile) mark, Natsuno stopped and pulled out the Ziploc once again, and now the contents were really starting to look buttery!

She decided to give it just a little more time/distance, and when she stopped for her third check at seven kilometers (4,3 miles)…

…she saw that she’d done it! She’d made butter by running!

But while she could proudly say “Mission accomplished,” she couldn’t say “Mission deliciously accomplished” just yet. To make that judgement, she had to head back home for a taste test.

Since there was sill some liquid in the bag, she used a colander to separate the butter from the buttermilk, after which she could determine that she’d made 80 grams (2.8 ounces) of butter on her run.

▼ The buttermilk, by the way, got saved for use in cooking Natsuno’s next pancake batch.

Seeing as how home-made butter-run butter is sort of an intersection of fancy and rustic elements, taste-testing it with some lightly toasted baguette slices felt very appropriate.

Taking a bite, Natsuno was happy to find that, for as unusual as the production method may have been, her butter-run butter was delicious! She was especially pleased with the texture, since it not being hard or chilled let the full creaminess of the butter really dazzle her taste buds.

But did the effort she’d put into making the butter also save her some cash? No, not at all. The 200-mililiter carton of cream had cost Natsuno 517 yen (US$3.35) and yielded 80 grams of butter, which works out to 6.46 yen per gram. Meanwhile, the regular store-bought butter she gets at her local supermarket costs 539 yen for a 200-gram stick, or just 2.7 yen per gram.

That said, while we’re talking weights and measures Natsuno doesn’t have even an ounce of disappointment or regret at how her butter run turned out. From a pure flavor standpoint, she can’t definitively say her butter-run butter tastes two or three times better than the store-bought stuff, but did she enjoy the whole experience two or three times more than just slicing off part of a store-bought stick? Yes indeed!

It’s often said that ultimately we get more enjoyment out of spending our time and money on experiences rather than things, and Natsuno definitely feels like that’s true here. Sure, she’s not going to start using butter-run butter for all of her butter needs, but as a fun, special-occasion. Fresh-air activity, especially on a day when the weather is as inviting as this? That’s something she’d be happy to do again, and she’s already thinking about inviting a friend along too so that they can compare butters at the end of their jog.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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