What you’ll get is Paneer - Indian cottage cheese. I’ve done this and it worked fairly well - you can strain and squeeze the curds in a thin, closely-woven cloth, but if you want to make proper cheese, the curds really need to be inoculated with a starter culture of bacteria, otherwise they’ll be colonised by wild strains - which could be either good or bad, but is very unpredictable. Also, the curds are usually set using rennet, rather than lemon juice.
how long do you have to shake it before you get butter?
With full-cream milk, shaking vigorously for just a few minutes should cause small lumps of butter to appear - the longer you shake, the more they tend to coalesce into one nugget of creamy yumminess.
I think I’m going to buy some gold top on the way home and get the kids to make some butter tonight.
About 30 minutes, in my experience. It’s always longer than I think it will be. But it goes from “Something must be wrong with this cream, it won’t go past whipped…” to “Woah! Look at that! Butter!” in a matter of seconds. Those seconds just follow about 30 minutes of shaking. A blender would be much, much faster.
I made paneer once, and the recipe used a mix of live-culture yogurt and whole milk. I also recall there was some sort of cooking involved (I think the milk was heated?). It took about 15 minutes and was delicious! I used some sort of household acid, either vinegar or lemon juice, or maybe a mix? Whatever it was I didn’t have to buy it specially.
I am so going to make my own butter!
Yes, the milk is heated (scalded, I think they call it) for Paneer, but I think that’s also often true of regular cheese.
I’m sitting here shaking a plastic Skippy jar full of cream. Most has turned to butter. Toaster biscuit, here I come.
I used to make butter like this with my mom when I was a little kid. We used to use a gallon jar and about a quart of heavy cream. We never rinsed anything though. Just used a strainer to catch the butter and always saved the buttermilk. I used to LOVE drinking that stuff! Tastes nothing like the fake stuff sold in the stores. I always wanted to make real buttermilk pancakes with it.
Oh, forgot to mention the cool part. One of the fun things for me as a kid was the magical moment I believed the cream instantly turned to butter. As you are shaking the jar of cream from side to side, there is a moment where the glass coated with a thick white coating of cream, almost instantly clears up and you are sloshing around a lump of butter. The thick white coating becomes transparent and you can see thin yellow butter milk. That’s how you know you’re done (we used to go for a few more minutes for good measure). It was pretty cool!
I also did it in second grade. I think it was '62. This must be some kind of conspiracy. We passed the jar around so that no one had to do more than a few shakes at once. Kept the little arms from getting tired.
About four years ago I took a two hour class where we made cottage cheese (or paneer). The instructor said that the milk had to reach a certain temperature for the lemon to work.
You city kids!
I used to make butter using a churn and fresh cream from the cow. Then it went into a mold that left a design imprinted on the block of butter.
The churn itself looked like a very big masonry jar. It had a lid with a hole in the center. A long wooden handle disappeared through the hole. At the hidden end of the handle was a round wooden disk that was set at a 45 degree angle to the handle. When cream was poured into the churn or jar, whoever had been suckered into churning sat with the jar before her and lifted the handle up and down, swishing the disk through the cream. Repeat six thousand times and you have butter. As a kid, you only volunteered for this about one time.
Hey! We did this in first grade! (It was sometime in the 90’s, though; I don’t care to count back.)
I guess my class was just more precocious than your class. 
Heh, we do this all the time in Indian families as we don’t really like Western butter. It’s kind of nasty and I don’t like salted butter anyway. Butter is supposed to be slightly sweet.
A trick - when it comes out of the blender, you can put some ice on it, too, and it makes it a bit harder. Then you can even “wash” the butter to get rid of the film and you get nice pats of yummy homemade butter.
Mangetout speaks of the proper way to make paneer, yes, but you can also buy ready-made blocks of paneer from the Indian store. Paneer making is a hassle I find, though I do it once in a while, and even I prefer to buy it.
Ha!
In all seriousness, I’ve been telling people (IRL and here) that school since my son has been going (born in '93) is almost exactly a year ahead of when I went to school - preschool now does what I did in kindergarten, and on all the way up. Most people don’t believe me. So the fact that even the solidly traditional 2nd grade activity of making butter in baby food jars has moved up a year makes me giggly with vindication. Or something.
That’s nothing - we used to shake the cows (in some places, they just tip them over, or so I’ve heard, but that’s not so effective), then squeeze the butter directly onto our bread, straight from the udders.
Thank you. I was beginning to think I was the only one.
Except the churns I remember had cross pieces at the end of the handle. I seem to remember the novelty wearing off quickly, too.
Some of my family still does this, in India.
If you’re too busy to use even the blender, consider a food processor. Pour in heavy cream, hit the “on” button, wait about 30 seconds, and scrape the butter off the blades.
Another veteran of a real butter-churn here.
Wooden, with copper liner, cross-piece at the end of the stick.
Seems like it took half the day but it was good.
My favorite part was the middle stage, sour cream!
Wait…what?
Sour cream is an intermediate stage of butter making? I thought it was cultured and aged and stuff. Seriously, I can make sour cream? Why didn’t anyone tell me this before?