Today, at school, we made....butter! Surprisingly ( or not) this isn't the first time we've made butter. The first go around looked like this: 4 grad students, 10 mason jars and 1 gallon of whole milk followed by at least three days of sore arms. If you are of the ambitious type you can make butter at home; just fill a mason jar with some whole milk, tighten the lid REALLY tight and shake shake shake shake (all bar tender like!). You'll start to notice that it'll change from a liquid sound to a sloshy sound to a definite ball of something sound. You could probably stand to drain it then shake it around some more. During this process the milk fat globules are being broken down and sort of huddling together. While this is happening all of the water in milk (which is about 80%) is being squished out so at the end of the butter making process you'll have the butter and the buttermilk! (Just a small nugget of info: the cultured buttermilk you find at the grocery store is just skim milk with some bacteria or acid). Its' that easy!
That brings us to today, our second round of butter making was WAY less labor intensive but still as interesting! Today we used a commercial (pilot scale) continuous butter churn which basically looks like a missile launching submarine. These churns usually consist of three main parts: the balance tank which feeds the milk, the sieving/raking tube which does all the work of separating and huddling the butter grains and finally the texturizer which is a line up of plates with different sized holes that makes the butter smooth and pack-able (like what you see at the stores). Our texturizer section of our machine was maybe a foot long however some texturizers in big butter making plants can be upwards of 35 feet! The principle of the continuous machine is basically the same as the hand churning.
Those are butter grains. They're usually about the size of golf balls before they fall into the texturizer.
This little window looks into the texturizer after they've been passed through the sieves. Those squigglys fall into another section that has counter rotating screw-looking things. After the butter's passed through the screw-looking things they come out of a nozzle!
Nifty huh!? Well this post has another butter related purpose too. If all goes according to plan I will be working for Land O' Lakes this summer as a manufacturing intern! YAY!
Go make some butter!
Stay tuned! Stay hungry!
-Taryn Julia
