Connecting Dairy

Butter is a dairy product that is derived from churning milk or cream. It’s most common uses in everyday life are as a spread or as a cooking aid, particularly for frying, baking and mixing sauces. Butter can be made from the milk of any animal although the most popular commercial butters are derived from cow’s milk.

Butter has a soft consistency when left at room temperature which makes it an ideal food stuff to be used as a spread. When kept refrigerated it will harden to a solid state. It will melt to a liquid after gentle heating which makes it a perfect ingredient to cook with. Butter consists of a mixture of water, butterfat and milk proteins.

The process of making butter starts with milk or cream. These substances both contain butterfats in microscopic pockets but these fats are prevented from joining together by tiny membranes that surround each one of them. To create the solid butter the milk or cream needs to be agitated to break down these membranes and allow the butterfats to come together.

Butter falls into two main categories; sweet cream butter and raw cream butter. The type of butter depends on whether the original dairy product was pasteurized (the process of killing bacteria and microbes) or not.

Butter made from pasteurized milk or cream is the sweet type and butter made from an unpasteurized source is the raw type. Sweet cream butter is traditionally more popular across the United States and United Kingdom and raw cream butter is preferred across continental Europe.

Other types of butter include salted butter, which as it’s name suggests has salt added during production, and clarified butter, which is made by removing most of the water and milk content from the butter through a process of heating and cooling, leaving almost pure butterfat.

Most butter contains about 50% saturated fats and a relatively high amount of cholesterol. The health concerns that this raises has seen the growth of a range of healthier alternative products for today’s consumer.

Dairy products are foodstuffs that are produced from milk. Usually these products will be derived from cow’s milk, although other types of milk, such as goat, sheep or buffalo are also used. The most common dairy products include milk, butter and cheese.

Milk will usually be processed in a dairy factory after being collected from dairy farms, although some dairy farms will do their own processing on-site.

Milk

Probably the most common dairy derivatives of milk is simply the milk itself. It can be pasteurized to help preserve the milk and extend its shelf life and graded to ensure the correct level of fat remains in the milk. It can then be sold as milk, or further processed to create products such as cream, milk powder or condensed milk.

Butter

Butter is produced by churning milk or cream which agitates the molecular structure of the milk and allows the fats within the milk to join and separate from the other parts of the milk. The liquid left by the churning process is called buttermilk and can be used as a dairy product itself.

Cheese

Cheese is formed when milk is coagulated, or curdled, by the addition of the enzyme rennet. This separates the milk into liquid called whey and a solid material called curds. The curds are removed and will be processed in a number of different ways to form cheese.

There are a number of varieties of cheese which take on individual flavours and textures according to how they are treated, which includes how they are aged, how much they are dried and the specific ways that they are flavoured.

Dairy products are a good source of calcium and protein and parents are encouraged to make sure their children get plenty of dairy in their diet to help promote healthy bone growth. People who are lactose intolerant however will not be able to enjoy dairy produce.

Dairy produce is made from the extraction and processing of milk. The milk is typically from cows, yet can often be made from goats, sheep, horses and buffalo.

A dairy farm usually rears cows specifically to produce milk to enter the human or animal food chain. Dairy farms are common in across world civilisation, although the degree of mechanisation differs. Large dairy farms will use machines to milk cows that produce a high yield of milk, simply milking by hand is now relegated to smaller farms or small holdings that may have a few cows. Managing the production of sufficient milk is tricky for the large dairy farms, as they must ensure cows are milked at least once a day.