Curious: Method Of Production And A Brief History Of The Oil

2024 Author: Jasmine Walkman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 08:29

As all or most of us know, butter is a dairy product made from fresh or fermented whipped cream or directly from milk.

Butter is most often used for spreading or as a fat in cooking - for baking, for preparing sauces or frying. Due to its many applications, the oil is consumed every day in many parts of the world. It consists of milk fat surrounded by small droplets, composed mostly of water and milk proteins. Most often, cow's butter can be found in the store, but this does not prevent it from being prepared from the milk of other mammals, such as sheep, goats, yaks or buffaloes.

Quite often the oil is sold with various additives such as salt, essences, colorants. When the oil is melted, the water in it separates and it turns into refined or pure oil, which consists almost exclusively of fat. The word "oil" is also used in the names of other products of plant origin such as peanut oil, coconut oil, walnut oil, sunflower oil and others.

As we know, when the oil cools, it hardens and at room temperature softens to a consistency that allows lubrication. The oil is melted to a thin liquid at a temperature of 32-35 degrees. Its color is usually pale yellow, but can also be bright yellow and white. It depends on the cream or milk used to make it. As we know, milk and cream are inhomogeneous.

They contain milk fat in the form of microscopic droplets. These droplets are surrounded by membranes that contain photolipids, which prevent the conversion of fats into a homogeneous mass. The butter is produced by whipping the cream, which damages the membranes and allows the milk fat to combine, separating from the other parts of the cream.

Different methods of butter production give products with different consistency, which is due to the composition of milk fat in the final product. Butter contains fats in three different forms: free milk fats, milk fats in crystals and undamaged fat droplets. In the final product, the different proportions of these forms lead to different consistencies in the oil.

Oil with many crystals is harder than that with dominant free fats. Almost all butter production processes today begin with pasteurized cream, which is heated to relatively high temperatures - over 80 degrees. Before whipping, the cream is cooled to 5 degrees and left at room temperature for at least 8 hours. This allows half of the milk fat to crystallize.

Rough fat crystals damage the droplet membranes during breaking, which speeds up the production process. Before modern technology entered the production of butter, the cream was collected from several milkweeds and was a few days old, which means that it fermented at the time when butter was made from it.

Such butter produced from fermented cream is called cultured. In continental European countries, cultured butter is preferred, while sweet cream butter is preferred in the United States and the United Kingdom. Because milk can turn into butter, even accidentally, the invention of butter most likely dates back to the early days of dairy. It may have first appeared in the region of Mesopotamia between 9000 and 8000 BC.

The earliest oil must have been sheep's or goat's, because cattle are thought to have been domesticated 1000 g later. One of the most ancient ways of making butter, which is still used in some parts of Africa and the Middle East, is this: the skin of a whole goat is half-filled with milk, inflated completely with air and sealed. Then hang with ropes on a tripod of sticks and hit back and forth with stones to separate the oil.

Butter was certainly known to classical Mediterranean civilizations, but it was rather not a staple food, especially in ancient Greece and ancient Rome. In the warm Mediterranean climate, unwashed butter spoils easily, unlike cheese. People in ancient Greece believed that butter was a more suitable food for the northern barbarians.