I’ve made butter as a child, back when we had a cow and dairy products coming out our ears. We had the old turn crank on a jar device.
I decided this weekend to relive my past and make some from heavy cream…But Hey…It’s the 21st century…I used the wife’s Kitchen Aid blender.
The cream mixed for a while, then it eventually became whipped (like you’d expect). But then, very rapidly, the butter just coalesed from the butter milk. THis took just a few seconds and was reminiscent of the speed of a phase change (like water instantly freezing).
Now, I have a fair amount of chemistry knowledge, but I don’t know so much about butter. I don’t THINK a chemical reaction has occured to make the change. I think its more of a physical change. However, I don’t really know.
Why does butter form? WHat is happening on the molecular level to cause this to happen…Is it a physical change, or is it truly a chemical change. IF it is a chemical change, what does agitation do to cause the chemical change?
Please, someone enlighten me. My last couple of posts here were largely ignored, so I bathed and brushed my teeth very well so as not to offend anyone.
I have no idea, but I’m replying anyway as it’s my Lazy Doper way of subscribing to the thread.
I’ve noticed this myself, and you’re right, it’s just bizarre in it’s suddenness-after-long-period-of-no-change-at-all. I always tell my kids they’ll always know how long it will take - 10 minutes of shaking *after *you think, “Oh, my god, this is never going to work - I must have done something wrong!”
AFAIK, it’s a physical change. Unlike most fats, butterfat is composed of many, many small discreet globules surrounded by a membrane that prevents the globules from sticking together in a single mass, or from floating to the top like you’d imagine (nature’s own emulsification scheme). Churning the butter breaks these membranes. The breakage is not sudden, though; the globules are prevented from sticking together by other unbroken globules that are in the way. However, when a critical percentage of the butterfat globules break, they suddenly start clinging together. When that happens, the remaining aerated cream starts to collapse. The collapse forces the remaining butterfat molecules closer together. When this happens, the speed of the clinging is severely accelerated. As you mention, this can be quite fast. More on butter is here
When you make whipped cream you need to make sure that all your equipment is very cold, or you make butter as in the OP (if you were getting whipped cream first then your mixer was on too high a speed). I would guess that is because the globules don’t break easily when they’re cold.
Malienation pretty much has it right. Cream is an emulsion of oil in water. If you were to look at it closely, you would see globules of fat floating in water. Mixing it breaks up the fat globules allowing them to coalesce into butter which is an emuslion of water in oil.
How weird. I made butter at the weekend too. It was really good - I started with double cream, but I had to add some water, or else it would just turn into solid cream in the jar and would then resist shaking before it could turn to butter.
Butter is one of those things, the more you know about it, the more interesting it is. The world is more or less divided into those who eat butter and those who eat oil, and never the twain shall meet – at least until these days when food has become more than just sustenance. The butter-eating North despised the oil-eating South. There was a firm belief for centuries in the Mediterranean lands that butter caused the leprosy so common in the north. The Japanese thought it was their butter that made the Europeans smell so bad, they called foreigners “bata-kusai” meaning “butter stinkers”. (Bata is a Japanese rendering of the English word “butter”.)
In India butter is “ghee”, the most precious substance, given by the most sacred beast, the cow. *Inferior * food becomes superior food, edible even by a Brahmin, if it is cooked in butter. At Hindu weddings, male guests compete to see who can eat the most ghee - the more you can eat, the more virile you are.
Butter is important in many cultures. The Irish supposedly eat more butter than any other people.
Butter is a magical substance, pertaining to both purity and excess. Not only is it a fat and so is delicious, it is tangled up with status and “good taste”. Even those with good taste like things that taste good, and butter is the grease that even the most discerning can enjoy. Nowadays butter is back on its pedestal and margarine is flung to the floor of the laboratory from which it came. The usurper has been shown to be Evil, and Butter, from the Mother’s Milk, golden and rich and pure, is safe to eat again.
The chemical process that makes butter “come” is described in a post above by Malienation. But butter is more than chemistry and that’s the problem with margarine: it isn’t.
Additional fun fact: butter that has gone rancid is perfectly safe to eat, it’s just not tasty (at least by Western standards). Rancidity is caused by mere oxidation of the fat, not the byproduct of some sort of nefarious bacteria. BTW, some cultures allow butter to go rancid because they like it that way, and use it in various recipes.
I must confess, this thread could go on forever as far as I’m concerned!
Most North Americans like mild, salted butter. I do, myself. But I like to take sweet butter, spread it, and then sprinkle it with coarse salt. I also like stronger “cultured” butter, but do not (yet) enjoy “rancid” butter.
I was born in a field of buttercups, I think. Musta bin.