Getting butter from yogurt

I am skeptical that butter from yogurt is a thing.

When yogurt is made the milk proteins denature and form a mesh that traps all the large molecules in the milk. Water, sugar, and some small molecules can come out but the fat never does- it's huge and tightly bound up in the gel.

Even when yogurt is blended up the whey will separate out but the fat never does. I have a hard time believe that extricating the fat from that protein mesh will be easier than just letting it rise to the surface in milk.

Perhaps thoroughly cooking the yogurt would melt out the fat but you would still lose the rest of the milk solids and would have ghee.

With purchasable yogurt it would be even less feasible because it is often made from low-fat milk to begin with.

EDIT-

Searching online I was able to find Indian recipes for making butter from yogurt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vK8hW_oSu0
In this case they made yogurt from heavy cream. The goal was a cultured butter- not easier butter.

The best butter is made from yoghurt. Besides you get a bonus which is ayran (watery yogurt). Making butter from milk is easy as told. But not tasty because the fat has milk taste. When you extract it from yogurt the butter has its pure taste. ? am from turkey and all the butter in the villages of turkey are made from yogurt. Shelf-stable products in markets are made from milk because of economy of scale. We buy the real butter from the village women in the town bazaars. Anyway, these are for your Turkey visit. But be aware of how real butter is made!

in rural turkey butter is made only from yogurt.add water to homemade naturel yogurt and mix it for some 10 15 minutes.you will see first butter bubbles and then the butter clusters on the surface of ayran.seperate it with a spoon and wash with cool water to get it more pure and add some salt. when you smell and taste you will see it is much more different and tastier from milk made butter. add a spoon salty freshbbutter to the pot and cook it untill the salt in butter get coffe colour.and feel the smell.when you cook milk made butter it will smell bad because of the milk it has.

by the way..when you make yogurt at home the butter will condensate upper so you can seperate that part easily from yogurt and then mix...you dont have to mix all the yogurt.

You can get butter from soured milk or soured cream, but this is not the same thing as yogurt. It uses different culture and fermentation techniques than making yogurt. In today's parlance, what you'd need is "buttermilk" (the original meaning is the whey left after making butter out of it, but today the complete soured milk is sold under the name, without the butter separated). But I am not sure that you can use store-bought buttermilk, it might be stabilized chemically and physically in ways which prevent the fat separation.

Butter is made from yoghurt in Jordan as well. This is typical of countries with sheep milk, as the sheep fat does not rise to the top spontaneously as with cow milk and people have learnt to churn butter from soured milk -aka yoghurt in a hot climate. You add cold water or ice to bring the temperature of the churned yoghurt down. I have found however, that there is an ideal PH at which the yoghurt releases the fat more easily. if it is too thick sometimes it does not work. A ph of 4.6 seems ideal from my experience and a temperature no higher than 12 C. The butter is superb and the leftover sour skim yoghurt/milk can be the basis of so many other recipes.

Butter can be churned from yoghurt. Done all the time in India. I have watched many women in the villages to this day churn butter from yoghurt. Water is added to yoghurt and churned until the fat/cream separates and is collected, washed in water and stored or melted to make ghee. Making your own yoghurt is an everyday affair in India. Due to the high heat milk, yoghurt etc does not keep well even in a refrigerator. So it is used up quickly. One way of using up your yoghurt is making butter from it. There is definite difference in taste. I also know that raw milk is more widely used and the yoghurt and butter from non pasteurized raw milk tastes so much better

many european cultures also make butter from cultured cream .. same tangy taste like the butter from yoghurt.

Its not just an "in ancient times" thing. People still churn yogurt to make butter in India. And the great thing is, that you get awesome buttermilk as a byproduct. In fact when you see the traditional drawings of Lord Krishna as a child stealing butter - those stories all refer to yogurt being churned

I always helped my mother churn 'yogurt made from milk' to bring out butter from it. In India milk is boiled before using. So it has some amount of nice cream on the top. This cream along with the milk is used for making yogurt (we call it curd) and when this is churned first with some warm water one starts seeing floating butter on the top. To make this layer of butter come together cold water or a few ice cubes are added to the churned buttermilk. Out comes the ball of butter. It is washed and consumed with different kinds of flat breads or used to prepare clarified butter also known as GHEE in India. This is many centuries old method to extract butter from yogurt made from milk.

Indian history says that Indian people made butter from curd (yogurt). Nowadays, in Western countries, butter is made from heavy cream.

But both method can be used to make butter.

I make butter from yogurt every two weeks. It's delicious. Take 2 pints heavy creem, bring to 200F and let cool to 120F. Stir in 2 tablespoons whole milk plain yogurt (from store or previous batch). Let set at about 80F until it sets like custard (about half a day). Refrigerate for a day. Whip yogurt with a stand mixer at high speed till you get whipped cream (a few minutes). Then churn at half speed until butter separates from the buttermilk (a few more minutes). Both butter and buttermilk will be infused with lovely yogurt scent. At this point you can also take the butter and make ghee by simmering on low heat until bubbling stops and before milk solids burn. Filter the ghee if you intend to use it for high temperature cooking. NOTE: a food processor or hand mixer can be used but are tedious and messy--a stand mixer is just so much easier. I use a Kitchenaid.

I am an Indian and I churn butter out of cultured heavy cream or whole milk yogurt. This can be done by adding a little yogurt to the cream or warm whole milk. Let it sit in room temperature for about 24 hours. Then churn the now cultured cream or whole milk yogurt until you see globules of butter. If using cultured cream it might feel thick, add some water (room temperature) for ease of churning. Stain the butter, clean it in cold water until clear water runs. Squeeze any excess water. This butter is definitely tastier than sweet cream butter. Worth trying:)

Yogurt is made from milk which has a fat content of 3.5-4.0 % only.

Cream has fat content of 30-35%.

You cannot extract butter from 3.5% of fat in yoghurt. That is bogus!