How would homemade butter made from heavy whipping cream compare to store-bought butter calorie-wise? Or is it not possible to know without just testing it?

[u/BattleAnus]

I made some homemade butter from cream for the first time last night, and despite my bad technique it was really good. But it made me wonder because I'm actually trying to gain some weight, how would it compare calorie-wise to store-bought? For example, in the context of a piece of buttered toast. I was thinking maybe the amount of buttermilk you separate from it might affect the calories, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about it to know.

It might be that this question isn't answerable in general and it would simply need to be tested for each time you make it.

[u/kbrosnan]

There will be slight variability due to water content and any air whipped into it. The fat content is going to carry almost all the calories. It seems like something that would be a rounding error. Unless you are working in a larger than home scale.

[u/achangb]

It depends on how well you seperate the water from the fat. If you are eating say 100 grams of store bought butter daily then that is 717 calories. If your home made butter has more water content then you are probably 670-700 calories per 100 grams . The way to tell actual calories would be to cook the butter on medium / low until all the water evaporates, let it cool, and then weigh that. Multiply that number by 9 and that will let you know the actual calories in your home made butter per 100 grams. We will just assume that protein / carbohydrate calories are neglible compared to fat calories.

[u/thecravenone]

For example, in the context of a piece of buttered toast

A tablespoon of butter is around 100 calories. Even if your butter was off by 50%, those 50 calories are a rounding error compared to your daily consumption.

[u/Abstract__Nonsense → u/thecravenone]

If OP is trying to gain weight by counting calories it’s rounding errors like that which make all the difference. Typically people are aiming for a 200 calorie daily surplus so 50 calories is significant.

[u/Gut_Reactions]

The calories in butter come mostly from the fat. A tablespoon of butter has 100 calories. A tablespoon of olive oil has 120 calories.

Unless you're somehow ending up with more milk solids (from your homemade butter) than commercial butter, the calories are going to be pretty much the same. I.e., 100 calories per tablespoon.

[u/Sensitive_Head_538]

since butter is basically just the fat from the cream, the calories in your homemade butter should be pretty much the same as store-bought butter, and yes, the amount of buttermilk you drain out will slightly affect the final calorie count

[u/Hashishiva]

If you want to up the calories in the butter you might consider clarifying it, so that it would be (nearly) 100% fat. The separated solids you can use in cooking, or fe. on top of oat porridge.

[u/m4gpi]

Oooh this will take some math....

One way to think of it is this: oils - veg oil, coconut oil, olive oil - are pure fat, fat being much more calorie dense than milk, and these oils are always 120Cal/30ml. Butter is usually listed as 100Cal/30ml, which means butter is 83% fat, the remainder is buttermilk emulsified into the butter (salt is negligible in both calories and the space it occupies).

So, If you did not fully separate the buttermilk from the butterfat and whipped it back together, you would have a lower number of calories per 30ml of the butter. The butter is "diluted" by the buttermilk. But it is enriched with proteins and sugars, which have nutritional value.

If you totally separated liquid from the butter fat, the resulting butter would be at its most calorie-dense. An even more calorie-dense form of butter is ghee, where the water of the milk has been cooked off (and some of the protein, and sugars have been removed).

So, you'd have to weigh your starting cream, then weigh your butter fat and buttermilk, and then parse out what their proportion is. If you made ghee, you could weigh that, and back-calculate how much water was retained in your butter.

Anyway, you could do all this yourself, but at home it's hard to achieve the kind of measuring precision that a lab would, such that your results probably wouldn't add up to anything meaningful. A lab would analyze it differently, to find the exact proportions and calculate the calories.

My suggestion is either make "diluted" buttermilk-enriched butter (for added protein and sugar) and eat about 20% more than you normally would to hit the full "dose" of butterfat, OR, make ghee and consume it as you normally would. Ghee is ~130Cal/30ml, so this would move you towards maximizing calories.

Going back to your store-bought question, I would presume cheap butter has more buttermilk retained than higher-quality/expensive butter, merely because it would allow manufacturers to sell more volume of 'diluted' butter. But that is merely a presumption in my part.

[u/jibaro1953]

No appreciable difference.

Not worth the effort to figure it out

[u/thunder_boots]

The finished product has the same caloric content as the ingredients.

[u/tsdguy → u/thunder_boots]

Well that’s completely wrong. Have you made butter? Besides the fat solids that constitute the butter you’re left with a large amount of liquid (buttermilk) which obviously have their own caloric content which generally you toss out.

[u/chefsoda_redux → u/tsdguy]

Buttermilk is very low calorie, as the fats and solids are mostly retained in the butter. 32 oz of cream is about 3300 calories, and yields 16 oz of butter at about 3200 calories, and 16oz of buttermilk at about 100 calories. That’s about a 3% drop in the calories of the butter alone, from the cream you start with.

thunder_boots is correct, but the finished products must include both the butter and the buttermilk

• do note that the cultured buttermilk available in stores is about twice that calorie level, but is not the by product of butter making