Course:FNH200/Projects/2020/Butter and the Buttermaking Process

Clarified butter: a version of butter with the remaining 16%-18% of water removed, leaving only milk fat.

Butter is an essential part of diets around the world, with Americans alone consuming 5.6 pounds per capita in 2012 and nearly three times that consumption in European countries. The simple ingredient is loved for its straightforward production and lack of processing, its familiar taste, and its sensory properties like smooth mouthfeel. Butter is an oil-in-water emulsion, 80% of which is composed of milk fats. While butter has always been a pillar of cooking, it has been the subject of recent controversy surrounding its health benefits or repercussions.

History

Napoleon Bonaparte III, the founder of the first version of margarine. Napoleon offered a reward to anyone who could invent a cheap butter alternative for the French military.

Dating back at least 3000 years, butter has always been on human plates. Roman and Greek emperors were thought to have used butter as a type of medication. The physical birthplace of butter is speculated to have come from northern Mesopotamia before making its way down to India, and eventually up to Europe. Northern Europe adopted butter as a cooking fat first, as the southern areas primarily used oils. It wasn't until the 5th to 15th centuries that butter became commonplace in household kitchens.

The exact origin of buttermaking is unknown, but the most likely explanation for its discovery was the early storage of milk in containers made from animal skins. The heat lead to fermentation which, along with the movement of the containers themselves, lead to partial churning of the milk, and the slow emergence of butter. Historical evidence suggests that once butter was discovered, different tribes of human developed a variety of unique churning methods. Early buttermaking techniques can still be observed in less modernized regions of the world.

Buttermaking today is a combination of commercial production, emphasizing efficiency and consistency, as well as small butter farms that focus on specialty butter for smaller markets.

Production

While buttermaking has undergone substantial evolution in recent years due to the introduction of modern technology, the fundamental principals have remained the same.

The Basics

The production of butter starts with raw milk from a cow. The milk must then undergo separation, where the milk fats are isolated from the rest of the milk material. The milk fats that are produced from this process are called buttercream. The remaining product, skim milk, is then sold on its own or recombined with a controlled portion of the buttercream to produce different types of milk with different fat contents. The amount of fat that is dispersed in the milk determines how thick, silky, and and flavourful the milk is. In modern production, the buttercream is then pasteurized to extinguish any unwanted bacteria before moving onto the more established churning stage.

Churning

A large butter churn for commercial butter production.

Churning is the slow process of moving the buttercream, often using a "tossing" motion, to combine the fat molecules and further separate out buttermilk, the second byproduct of buttermaking. It is important to take care in selecting the churning temperature and velocity, as this determines the total churning time before butter granules are formed. Churning for less than 30 minutes can lead to greasy, ill-formed granules, whereas churning for longer then 45 minutes can result in tough, or gritty granules. Regardless of the the success of churning, the resulting product is recognizable as butter.

Today's production conventions usually add further processing, such as salting the butter and packaging it for commercial sale. Other additional steps include further "working" of the butter to enhance its texture, splitting the churning into multiple stages, or smaller details like using artificial colouring to create a more consistent-looking product.

Packaging

Finally, regardless of the intended use of the butter, it will likely have to be stored in some kind of packaging. The most important considerations are the water content (as high as 16% in Canada), and exposure to light. The associated risks are the formation of mould and the potential for the product to go rancid, which can be combatted, respectively, with the pre-treatment of packaging materials and the use of translucent materials such as aluminum foil or parchment paper.

Health

Diets have varied in recent decades, but diet trends have a large impact on consumer perceptions and buying habits at the grocery store.

The 1970s brought high-fat diets like Atkins into the mainstream. It wasn't until the 1990s that diet trends took a dramatic shift into antagonizing fats, resulting in the explosion of low-fat food options. While this trend was largely replaced with modern views on "good fats" and "bad fats," the mentality of butter being bad has lingered. This can be best demonstrated by the abundance of butter alternatives such as margarine that still populate supermarket isles.

While there is little doubt that butter isn't health food, it certainly isn't the evil food that the 1990s made it out to be. Studies have shown neutral, or weak at best, correlation between butter consumption and common health concerns, despite public expectation of strong correlation or even causation.

Potential Exam Question

Question

Order the butter products from most, to least, processed.

• Buttercream
• Buttermilk
• Salted butter
• Clarified Butter

Answer

1. Buttercream (the first byproduct of buttermaking)
2. Buttermilk (the second byproduct of buttermaking)
3. Clarified butter (produced from butter after the last stage of buttermaking)

Justification

This question can be answered using only FNH200 knowledge, and without existing knowledge of buttermaking. One can determine that buttermilk must, by name, have less fat content than buttercream, which obviously corresponds to another stage of food processing. Furthermore, given that butter is the "end result" product in normal buttermaking, it should be clear the clarified butter is a subsequent derivative. I like the question because it also evokes thoughts about the role of fats as a food major component, and the complexity of food science involved in producing relatively basic foods.