Last week for Thanksgiving we bought a pint of cream from the store. Some of it was used in the mashed potatoes, for whipped cream, and then a little on Saturday to make waffles.
After that the cream sat undisturbed in the refrigerator door all week. Last night I took it out and was surprised to find - butter. A rather large amount of the cream had formed butter in the bottom of the container.
All I know about making butter from cream led me to believe you’d need to churn it somehow to get the butter. Though actually I’m ignorant of the process. So did it form just by sitting there all week? Were the occasional door-openings enough to churn it? That doesn’t seem likely, but I don’t know.
I can’t say for certain that the butter wasn’t already in there, but I doubt it. I think it would have been noticeable before.
If cream freezes, you often get a butter-like separation as a result of that.
However, I’d think that the trip home from the grocery store and frequent door opening would be quite a bit of churning. My refrigerator door can easily be opened and closed a dozen times for a single meal. (Even when we’re efficient, we still have to take ingredients out, and put them back. After cooking, we open it again to get drinks, condiments, etc. as we eat. Then we put leftovers back in. That’s a minimum of 4 open/close cycles per meal.)
During times when we’re home all, and when we’re doing lots of food preparation like Thanksgiving… heck, we could be in and out of that refrigerator a hundred times a day.
I agree with Dracoi, though if you have a prankster kid like i was, they could have snuck down on a saturday morning and shaken the carton …<evil smiley>