Buttermaking and the churning of blended fat emulsions
Authors: FREDE E. , BUCHHEIM W. 
Published: August 2007

The methods used to manufacture butter (the Fritz process and batch‐wise churning) basically transform cream into butter grains and buttermilk by agitation and by beating air into the cream. Electron micrographs have been used to show the individual stages of buttergrain formation (ie, phase reversal from oil‐in‐water into water‐in‐oil):(1) building up foam from the skim milk, (2) adsorption of fat globules at the foam lamellae and (3) agglomeration of fat globules, (4) destabilization of the foam and mechanical clumping of the agglomerates to form butter grains. The microstructure of the butter grains as well as of the finished butter is characterized by a dispersion of water, air, fat crystals and fat globules in oil. By contrast, margarine has a more homogeneous structure. It does not contain globular fat. Thus the texture of butter tends to be solid, while that of margarine tends to be greasy. The consistency of butter can be influenced to a large extent by temperature treatment of the cream (physical cream ripening). A simple device has been developed for optimizing physical cream ripening which automatically records the melting and crystallization curves of the fat. Many raw material, process and machine specific parameters affect the efficiency of churing as well as the quality of butter, and many of these parameters exert an opposite effect. They therefore have to be set carefully so that they balance each other as required. Dosage of buttermilk and dried skim milk into the product stream has allowed the fat content of butter to be reduced to 60% and the water content to be increased to 36% without impairing product quality. This method has been developed further (Pasilac) for manufacturing a stable, long keeping half‐fat and quarter‐fat butter (the latter in only a few experiments so far). The structure of these products is not of the oil‐in‐water dispersion type. It could be characterized as a water‐in‐oil/fat dispersion, which contains an additional locally continuous aqueous phase. The Alfa buttermaking process (which was used during the 1950s and early 1960s) has recently been revived for the production of the Swedish mixed spread, Bregott, in order to minimize fat losses and to increase further maximum levels of oil inclusion in the blend. Blended spreads comprising milk fat (60­75%) + vegetable oil (25­40%) are no doubt more spreadable than butter at refrigerator temperature. However, they have proved to be too soft above 16­18°C. Therefore experiments have been undertaken to improve the consistency of blended spreads by using different milk fat fractions. In order to preserve the butter character artificial creams have been prepared and churned. The fat mixtures were emulsified in skim milk. Distilled unsaturated monoglycerides were added to the fat phase at different concentrations (0­2%) to make the emulsions sufficiently unstable at low temperatures. Beyond a certain monoglyceride concentration the emulsions could be churned successfully. However, below this critical concentration (which corresponds to roughly half of the mass required for covering all fat globules with monolayers) churning efficiency decreased significantly. Electron micrographs elucidate the mechanism of destabilizing the cream by monoglycerides. Electron micrographs also reveal the globular structure of the products thus obtained. Globular structures are known to cause the typical butter like mouth feel. The firmness/temperature curves of spreads obtained by churning adequately blended fat emulsions could be improved over those of butter (ie, flattened and shifted). In addition, the consistency, as in the case of ordinary butter, could equally be influenced by physical cream ripening.