Ingredient: Butter
Category: Dairy
Season: All:
Butter is a dairy product made by churning fresh or fermented cream or milk .
Butter is used as a spread and a condiment, as well as in cooking applications such as baking, sauce making, and frying.
Butter consists of butterfat surrounding minuscule droplets consisting mostly of water and milk proteins .
The most common form of butter is made from cows' milk, but it can also be made from the milk of other mammals , including sheep, goats, buffalo and yaks.
Salt, flavourings or preservatives are sometimes added to butter.
Rendering butter produces clarified butter or ghee , which is almost entirely butterfat.
When refrigerated, butter remains a solid, but softens to a spreadable consistency at room temperature , and melts to a thin liquid consistency at 32–35 °C (90–95 °F).
The density of butter is 911 kg/m 3.
Butter generally has a pale yellow colour, but varies from deep yellow to nearly white.
The colour of the butter depends on the animal's feed and is commonly manipulated with food colorings in the commercial manufacturing process, most commonly annatto or carotene .
Types of butter (Dairy)
Before modern factory butter making, cream was usually collected from several milkings and was therefore several days old and somewhat fermented by the time it was made into butter.
Butter made from a fermented cream is known as cultured butter.
During fermentation, the cream naturally sours as bacteria convert milk sugars into lactic acid .
The fermentation process produces additional aroma compounds, including diacetyl , which makes for a fuller-flavoured and more "buttery" tasting product.
Cultured butter is usually made from pasteurised cream whose fermentation is produced by the introduction of Lactococcus and Leuconostoc bacteria.
Another method for producing cultured butter, developed in the early 1970s, is to produce butter from fresh cream and then incorporate bacterial cultures and lactic acid.
Using this method, the cultured butter flavour grows as the butter is aged in cold storage. For manufacturers, this method is more efficient since aging the cream used to make butter takes significantly more space than simply storing the finished butter product.
A method to make an artificial simulation of cultured butter is to add lactic acid and flavour compounds directly to the fresh-cream butter; while this more efficient process is claimed to simulate the taste of cultured butter, the product produced is not cultured but is instead flavoured.
Today, dairy products are often pasteurised during production to kill pathogenic bacteria and other microbes .
Butter made from pasteurised fresh cream is called sweet cream butter.
Production of sweet cream butter first became common in the 19th century, with the development of refrigeration and the mechanical cream separator.
Butter made from fresh or cultured un-pasteurised cream is called raw cream butter.
Raw cream butter has a "cleaner" cream flavour, without the cooked-milk notes that pasteurisation introduces.
In Continental Europe, cultured butter is preferred, cultured butter is sometimes labeled European-style butter in the United States.
Sweet cream butter dominates in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Commercial raw cream butter is virtually unheard-of in the United States.
Raw cream butter is generally only found made at home, by consumers who have purchased raw whole milk directly from dairy farmers, skimmed the cream themselves, and made butter with it.
It's rare in Europe as well.
Spreadable butters have been developed; these remain softer at colder temperatures and are therefore easier to use directly out of refrigeration.
Some modify the makeup of the butter's fat through chemical manipulation of the finished product.
Some through manipulation of the cattle's feed.
Some by incorporating vegetable oils into the butter.
Whipped butter, another product designed to be more spreadable, is aerated via the incorporation of nitrogen gas, normal air is not used, because doing so would encourage oxidation and rancidity .
All categories of butter are sold in both salted and unsalted forms.
Salted butters have either fine, granular salt or a strong brine added to them during the working.
Nations that favour sweet cream butter tend to favour salted butter as well, possibly reflecting the blander taste of uncultured butter. In addition to flavouring the butter, the addition of salt also acts as a preservative .
Another important aspect of production is the amount of butterfat in the finished product:
In the United States, all products sold as "butter" must contain a minimum of 80% butterfat by weight; most American butters contain only slightly more than that, averaging around 81%.
European-style butters generally have a higher ratio of up to 85% butterfat.
Clarified butter is butter with almost all of its water and milk solids removed, leaving almost-pure butterfat.
Clarified butter is made by heating butter to its melting point and then allowing it to cool off; after settling, the remaining components separate by density.
At the top, whey proteins form a skin which is removed, and the resulting butterfat is then poured off from the mixture of water and casein proteins that settle to the bottom.
Ghee is clarified butter which is brought to higher temperatures (120 °C/250 °F) once the water has cooked off, allowing the milk solids to brown.
This process flavours the ghee, and also produces antioxidants which help protect it longer from rancidity.
Because of this, ghee can keep for six to eight months under normal conditions.
The term "butter" is used in the names of products made from: puréed nuts or peanuts , such as peanut butter .
It is also used in the names of fruit products, such as apple butter .
Other fats solid at room temperature are also known as "butters"; examples include cocoa butter and shea butter .
In general use, the term "butter," when unqualified by other descriptors, almost always refers to the dairy product.
Once butter is softened, spices , herbs , or other flavouring agents can be mixed into it, producing what is called a composed butter or composite butter.
Composed butters can be used as spreads, or cooled, sliced, and placed onto hot food to melt into a sauce.
Sweetened composed butters can be served with desserts ; such hard sauces are often flavoured with spirits .
Cooking with butter:
Melted butter plays an important role in the preparation of sauces , most obviously in French cuisine .
Beurre noisette (hazel butter) and Beurre noir (black butter) are sauces of melted butter cooked until the milk solids and sugars have turned golden or dark brown; they are often finished with an addition of vinegar or lemon juice .
Hollandaise and béarnaise sauces are emulsions of egg yolk and melted butter; they are in essence mayonnaises made with butter instead of oil.
Hollandaise and béarnaise sauces are stabilized with the powerful emulsifiers in the egg yolks, but butter itself contains enough emulsifiers,mostly remnants of the fat globule membranes to form a stable emulsion on its own.
Beurre blanc (white butter) is made by whisking butter into reduced vinegar or wine , forming an emulsion with the texture of thick cream.
Beurre monté (prepared butter) is an unflavoured beurre blanc made from water instead of vinegar or wine; it lends its name to the practice of "mounting" a sauce with butter: whisking cold butter into any water-based sauce at the end of cooking, giving the sauce a thicker body and a glossy shine, as well as a buttery taste.
Butter is used for sautéing and frying , although its milk solids brown and burn above 150 °C (250 °F)—a rather low temperature for most applications. The smoke point of butterfat is around 200 °C (400 °F), so clarified butter or ghee is better suited to frying. Ghee has always been a common frying medium in India, where many avoid other animal fats for cultural or religious reasons.
Butter fills several roles in baking, where it is used in a similar manner as other solid fats like lard, suet or shortening but has a flavour that may better complement sweet baked goods.
Many cookie doughs and some cake batters are leavened, at least in part, by creaming butter and sugar together, which introduces air bubbles into the butter. The tiny bubbles locked within the butter expand in the heat of baking and aerate the cookie or cake.
Some biscuits like shortbread may have no other source of moisture but the water in the butter.
Pastries like pie dough incorporate pieces of solid fat into the dough, which become flat layers of fat when the dough is rolled out. During baking, the fat melts away, leaving a flaky texture.
Butter, because of its flavour, is a common choice for the fat in such a dough, but it can be more difficult to work with than shortening because of its low melting point.
Pastry makers often chill all their ingredients and utensils while working with a butter dough. |