The word butter may literally mean cow cheese
Butter's name runs back through Latin to a Greek word that likely joins ox or cow with cheese. Making it means smashing microscopic fat droplets until their protective skins burst and the fat clumps together. Whether it tastes tangy or mild depends on a choice most shoppers never notice: cultured or sweet cream.
In milk and cream, butterfat floats as tiny globules wrapped in membranes of phospholipids and proteins that stop them merging. Churning damages those membranes, the fat joins up into grains, and the watery remainder, traditional buttermilk, drains away. The grains are then worked, pressed and kneaded, by hand with wooden paddles called scotch hands, to squeeze out pockets of liquid. How much of the fat ends up as crystals, free fat or intact globules decides whether the butter is hard or soft.
Commercial butter is around 80 percent fat and 15 percent water, while traditional farm butter can be as low as 65 percent fat. It melts between 32 and 35 degrees Celsius, and its colour, from almost white to deep yellow, depends on the animal's feed and breed, though makers may add annatto or carotene. Cows supply most of it, but sheep, goats, buffalo and yaks are milked for butter too. Remove the water and milk solids and you get clarified butter such as ghee.
Before factories, cream from several milkings sat for days and soured as bacteria turned milk sugar into lactic acid, producing aroma compounds like diacetyl that give a fuller, more buttery taste. That is cultured butter, still preferred across continental Europe. Refrigeration and mechanical cream separators in the 19th century made sweet cream butter cheap, taking about 6 hours against up to 72 for cultured, and it dominates in Britain and America. Some US makers imitate the cultured flavour by adding lactic acid and diacetyl, labelled simply as natural flavours.
French butter's reputation for richer, flakier pastry comes partly from culturing, grass feeding and an 82 percent fat minimum versus 80 in the United States. In 2023 the world made six million tonnes of cow's-milk butter, with the US producing 16 percent. Salt, once essential for preserving butter on long journeys, is now mostly there for taste.
Source: Butter
