FISHY FLAVOUR IN BUTTER.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1350, 30 January 1912, Page 8

FISHY FLAVOUR IN BUTTER.

AGRICULTURAL DEPARTMENT'S EXPERIMENTS. \ ■ u Tho ( development of the so-called "fishy" flavour arising ■in certain ship-ments-of butter exported from New Zealand has been,.the subject of • investigation by, the-. Agricultural Department of late, the-endeavour being\to discover the source; of the development of {his peculiar arid offensive flavour.."' Further practical' experiments on a large scale' are to. be undertaken, but the results to date are most conclusive that the greater the degree of ,acidity in the cream and butter the more pronounced was -the taint of, fisluncs, clearly, proving that the over-'ripoiiing of cream is highly dangerous to the quality of tho resultant butter. It is not claimed, however, that high acidity , in cream is tho direct cause of this serious defect, although the experiments havo proved that over-acidity is evidently.a very important contributing factor. The average aciditv of cream which made good keeping butter was 0.318 per cent., while the avcrago acidity of ! cream which made fishy butter was 0.40 per cent. It appears from the tests that butter contains about one-half the acid developed in the" cream. For . the present the Department is led to concurwith Rodgersin'tho opinion that the development 'of fishy flavour in butter arises aa a result of a chemical chauge inducing a splitting-up of some of tho constituents into compounds possessing this peculiar character of smell and taste, the factors responsible for such change being apparently a degree of high aciditv of the cream and' overworking. A full description of experiments is published in the January number of the Journal of the Department of Agriculture under. the names of Messrs. C. J. Reakes, D. Cuddie, and H. A. Reid.