Natural Homemade Udder Butter open jar white cream
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Natural Homemade Udder Butter

Here’s the recipe for our homemade udder butter cream! We’re whipping up shea butter and coconut oil along with essential oils and a few other ingredients as a natural body lotion on our sweet Jersey cows after milking time. (And stealing a smidge for our own hands too when we’re done!)

Our gals are the best! Ok, so maybe I’m biased. You probably think your gals are the best. And I’m sure that we’re both right. We have good reason to love our sweet cows (or goats) so much! Good reasons, rather. I love their raw milk. I drink a minimum of 3 tall glasses of creamy good reasons every day. Let’s not even mention, butter, ice cream, mozzarella, farmhouse cheddar, ricotta, cream cheese, and sweet cream butter.

Udder Butter on a cup

So I want to spoil our gals for all the goodness they share and one way I’ve found is by making them silky, moisturizing Udder Butter balm to use on their mammary glands after milking. (And for full disclosure, I’ve been known to swipe a dab for my old lady homestead hands as well so I can attest to how luxurious it feels and how healing it is to chapped skin.) It’s so effective when you formulate it with your own homemade lip balm or lotion.

This makes sense since this is an awful lot like all of the DIY body butter recipes you see floating around on the web, making it fit for man and beast. It’s pretty simple to whip up too.

A calf feeding on his mother's breast
Cow's Udder

This year, Rusty sure did a number on poor Holly’s teats. At one point they literally looked shredded. That’s when I knew I had to get serious and do something more than a standard teat dip to treat her after milking. I created this homemade Udder Butter Cream and it worked wonders to heal her! It’s just one of the good things when you own a cow. Especially the milking ones.

The shea butter and sweet almond oil are incredibly soothing and softening to the skin, so why not for the bovine skin as well?!

The arrowroot powder helps cut down on the greasiness of the oils. I think it’s what makes for such a silky product.

Lanolin is a wonder as many nursing mums can attest to. I won’t have a baby without it! It’s only fair our girls get some after milking.

Natural Homemade Udder Butter Cream Ingredients

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Udder Butter-3 close up

Natural Homemade Udder Butter

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  • Total Time: 30 minutes
  • Yield: 2 1x

Ingredients

Scale

(Click ingredients for links where to purchase.)

Instructions

  1. In a double boiler, melt the coconut oil, shea butter, lanolin, and beeswax.
  2. Once it’s combined, shut off the stove and let it sit, melted, for about half an hour.
  3. Whisk in the arrowroot powder.
  4. Set the bowl in another bowl of ice water to hasten the cooling process.
  5. Stir occasionally, scraping the sides as it begins to harden.
  6. Once about 2/3 of it is solid, use a whisk attachment of your mixer on high to whip it up until you get the right “whipped” texture.
  7. Add in the rosemary, lavender, and tea tree oil along with the Vitamin E and whisk it to incorporate fully.
  8. Spoon into a container and, if possible, store between 50-80 degrees.
  • Author: RA Administr@t
  • Prep Time: 5
  • Cook Time: 25

I chose lavender and tea tree essential oils, which are pretty much in everyone’s medicine cabinet these days with good reason. They’re anti-this, that, and the other thing. And so is the rosemary-infused olive oil. They’ll keep the nasties away and thanks to that, you might not need to use a teat dip.

I tweak this recipe throughout the year depending on the air temperature. You could use all coconut oil in the winter, the mix of coconut oil & shea butter in the spring and fall, and then harden it up with some beeswax in summer.

Even at that if you leave it outdoors in the 90-degree heat, it will probably melt into a liquid. Forget it in the barn in the winter, it will be pretty hard to get out of the jar. Your best bet would be to bring it indoors after milking, but I don’t ever see that happening with my main milking crew. It’s still usable though. It will resolidify after melting and if it got too hard, chip out a piece and melt it in your hands.

Frankly, the only problem I’ve had with this balm is that if one of our milk maidens is helping… and by one of, I mean someone quite specific (Rebekah)…she’ll forget to put the lid on and leave it sitting real low and our farm dog, Belle, likes to eat it. She eats cow & sheep manure too. This means two things: 1.) Don’t let her lick you. And, 2.) Don’t take her willingness to partake of Udder Butter as an indicator of its edibility. It’s for external use only.

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11 Comments

    1. I can’t say for sure it would work, but I think I would use plain olive oil first and sub the rosemary for one of the other EO’s if you wanted to use it. It won’t have the conditioning properties that the olive oil has.

  1. So mine is SUPER yellow? My shea was pretty yellow and the lanolin. I used raw ingredients. But it didn’t whip up like the consistency in picture, so maybe I’ll use more shea or beeswax and less coconut oil?

    It feels sooo good in my skin! I will be making this for the house too! And maybe in the car…I’m a home health nurse and identity hand sanitizer and gloves all day this will be great for my hands and my sweet mama cow! Thank you!

    1. Is your shea unrefined/virgin? I used that in my last batch and it wouldn’t whip up like it does when I used refined. The unrefined has a softer/greasier feel. I’m sure the ingredients you used were the source of the color.

  2. Quinn
    me again. . .can you comment on the info. in the etsy shop about the fact that you make this product differently in the summer vs. the winter? I don’t want this ti melt.

    1. It probably will still melt if it’s like 90 outside. We bring it inside so that doesn’t happen. I use lesser amount of beeswax in the winter and the higher amount listed in the recipe for summer so it doesn’t melt so easily. You could try all shea butter or cocoa butter instead of coconut oil because the have a higher melting point I believe.

  3. Thank you Quinn! I should get the ingredients and make my girls some. Sadly we dried Bessy off before we went away. I need to try milking Chocco again (it’s on my list for next week). If we aren’t successful Dave said we should buy another cow. We LOVE our raw milk far too much!
    Blessings
    Renata:)

    1. Men. Why do they always need to be the voice of reason? We have one cow I can’t bear the thought of getting rid of, but it probably will be the wise thing to do. If it came down to milk or no milk though, I think the decision would be a LOT easier! Hoping Chocco gives it up to you!!

  4. This looks lovely Quinn! I love how the balms we make for our bovines can double in our house as well!

    1. Feels good being economical, doesn’t it?

      (Hey btw, you came up today in SAH- there is a blog called homestead humor that apparently has copied one of your chicken posts word for word. Sounds like they’re jerks when you request them to take it down, but they will do so.)