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What is the relationship between butter, ghee, and cream?
Butter is a familiar food for most people. Even if you've never seen butter, you've likely eaten buttered bread or butter cookies. However, many people don't realize that butter is a dairy product.
Butter is called "奶油" (cream) in Taiwan and "牛油" (cow oil) in Hong Kong. According to China's national food safety standards, "butter" corresponds to "黄油" (butter) or "奶油" (cream), while "cream" corresponds to "稀奶油" (light cream).
The History of Butter: Edible and Usable
Butter has a long history as a food. The earliest record of butter dates back 4500 years to a limestone tablet depicting its production process. Beyond its use as food, its rarity and perceived purity led to its use in religious ceremonies in many cultures.
Butter's historical uses were as versatile as any product, widely applied in daily life around the world. The ancient Greeks and Romans used it as a "night cream" on their skin and as "hair wax" on their hair for a beauty effect. The ancient Egyptians used it to treat eye infections and applied it to the skin to treat skin infections and burns. Norwegians believed that eating butter prevented kidney and bladder stones. There's also an old English custom of giving newlyweds a pot of butter to bless them with many children.
Initially in Europe, butter was considered food for barbarians by the ancient Romans and Greeks. Only after the fifteenth century did butter undergo a transformation, becoming a symbol of wealth and luxury. This didn't last long; following the Industrial Revolution and the development of industrial production, butter production efficiency increased, and costs decreased significantly. Butter, once a luxury, gradually appeared on the tables of ordinary people.
Furthermore, many artists today use butter as a medium for their artwork.
Butter Sculpture: Farm Life
Butter Sculpture: Marilyn Monroe
What is the relationship between light cream and butter? How is butter made?
Milk is an emulsion containing approximately 3.6% fat. This fat is dispersed in the milk as small fat globules, typically 0.1-20 micrometers in diameter. Why don't these small fat globules clump together and cause the milk to separate? This is due to the composition of milk fat: over 98% is neutral fat, primarily triglycerides, with the remaining less than 2% being polar fat, mainly phospholipids. The core of these small fat globules is hydrophobic triglycerides, surrounded by a membrane of phospholipids and proteins. The hydrophobic side of this membrane faces the hydrophobic triglycerides, while the hydrophilic side faces outward, allowing these small fat globules to remain relatively stable in the milk without clumping together.
However, although the fat globules do not merge, their density is still slightly lower. Therefore, if milk is left to stand for a long time, the fat will gradually rise to the top. Using this density difference, we can separate milk into light cream and skim milk through centrifugation.
The Process of Transforming Light Cream into Butter
Light cream contains approximately 40% fat and 60% water; the fat is also dispersed in the water as fat globules. The fat globules are separated by their outer membranes, preventing them from coalescing. The fat globules are surrounded by continuous water. This is called a water-in-oil emulsion. If we apply mechanical force to the light cream, disrupting the membranes surrounding the fat globules, we can cause the originally isolated fat globules to unite. If we maintain a low temperature at the same time, allowing the fat to solidify (the solidification point of milk fat is around 30 degrees Celsius), the excess water will separate from the fat. The solidifying fat particles gradually stick together, forming a large mass. At this point, the remaining small amount of water is dispersed in the fat as small droplets, reversing the water-in-oil emulsion to an oil-in-water emulsion, and the light cream becomes butter.
In actual production, the light cream is usually pasteurized first to kill microorganisms, ensuring consistent product quality, and inactivating lipases and oxidoreductases to limit their decomposition and oxidation of milk fat. Then, specific lactic acid bacteria are inoculated into the light cream to ferment and produce the characteristic flavor compounds of butter. The cream is then vigorously churned to complete the phase inversion from water-in-oil to oil-in-water. Finally, slow, gentle stirring transforms the unformed butter lumps into uniform butter. Salt can be added at this final step to produce salted or semi-salted butter. Typically, 20 liters of whole milk (only using the fat component) are needed to produce 1 kilogram of butter.
Butter is delicious, but don't overeat!
Butter is delicious; the French even have an old saying, "No butter, no feast." Butter can be spread directly on bread, used to cook other foods, and used to make pastries and cookies. Butter is more than 80% fat, with less than 16% water, and the rest is residual protein, carbohydrates, minerals, and vitamins. Butter is high in calories; 100 grams of butter contains 3136 kilojoules (750 kilocalories), much higher than chocolate (100 grams of dark chocolate contains about 2200 kilojoules). What you may not know is that in addition to providing a lot of calories, butter is also rich in fat-soluble vitamins (vitamins A, D, E, and K), especially vitamin A; 10 grams of butter provides 8% of the daily recommended intake of vitamin A.
However, butter also contains high cholesterol, with 240-280 mg of cholesterol per 100g, so it is considered one of the foods that can cause cardiovascular diseases and other health problems. Therefore, people with high blood lipids should eat less butter. However, for people with normal lipid metabolism, moderate consumption of butter will not harm the body. Since the vitamins in butter are easily destroyed at high temperatures, it is best to spread butter directly on bread and eat it raw. Although butter is also a dairy product, it only contains trace amounts of lactose, so even people with lactose intolerance will not experience discomfort when eating butter.
So, if you eat a little butter every day, won't a whole block go bad before you can finish it? Don't worry about that. The main component of butter is fat, and microorganisms cannot survive and reproduce on it. The only thing to watch out for is fat oxidation and hydrolysis. If the storage temperature is too high or the packaging is not tight, fatty acid oxidation or hydrolysis may produce some volatile ketones and aldehydes, causing the butter to have an unpleasant odor. Therefore, each time you use it, pay attention to opening only the amount you need, and remember to wrap it up and put it back in the refrigerator afterward. In addition, if you buy too much, you can freeze the butter. When you need to eat it, remember to put it back in the refrigerator to thaw five or six hours in advance.
Category: A handy tip
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