BUTTER MAKING.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 2, Issue 169, 1 March 1878, Page 3

BUTTER MAKING.

Pure butter is the most complicated natural fat mass on record ; it consists of not less than eight fatty acids in combination with a substance known in its isolated state by the name of oilsweet or glycerine. Four of these acids in their isolated states are solids ; four of them are liquids ; these latter acids are remarkable for their unpleasant odor and taste ; whilst in combination with that peculiar compound, the oil-sweet, that strong odour is not noticeable, hut as soon as that combination by some cause or other is disturbed, their objectionable odour and taste become manitest, and we say the butter is rancid. Practice seems to endorse, in the interest of the making and preserving of good butter, the following rules : Have your apparatus for butter-making well cleaned ;do not churn at a higher temperature than from 50 to 56deg. F. ; keep off all offensive odours, for fats, as a general rule, absorb them very readily ; carry the entire process on with speod, and shorten thus the injurious access of air under very disadvantageous circumstances ; wash the separated butter under little agitation with a saturated solution of best dairy salt, and repeat this last treatment but a few times. Too much washing injures the quality of the butter as far as the nicety of its flavour is concerned ; too little washing leaves too much milk-sugar, and particularly, caseine (or cheese-stuff) behind. This caseine is, in the language of chemists, a nitrogenous substance, and is most remarkable on account not only of its disposition to break up into very disagreeable smelling and tasting substances but also to have the property to impart its own instability upon other more stable compounds, as, for instance, the neutral fats of the butter. Its effect on the butter is a meie question of degree which salt under the most favourable circumstances, will only prevent for a limited time. The larger the amount of caseine left, the sooner will the butter be changed, a result which perfectly tight packing and thus a most efficient exclusion of the air can oii?y somewhat delay.