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.