SC - butter making clarificatoin

[Mordonna22@aol.com]

maddie teller-kook wrote:

> A consideration... could we still use this techique with cream that is available
> today? Most commercial cream is ultra-homoginized and this could make it difficult
> to use this process.   I guess if unhomoginized cream or milk is available, this
> process could be used.
> just a thought.
>
> meadhbh

I don't know that most cream is ultra-homogenized...yes, it is usually marked U.H.T.,
which I understood to mean ultra-high-temperature or some such, essentially meaning
sterilized above and beyond the usual pasteurization temp. You may be right, though.
I suppose anything that changes the way the fat is emulsified into the water phase
would work. I doubt the science of it is much different from overwhipping cream until
it turns into butter and then skimming the butter off the top. Maybe one of those
Scandinavian wooden whips, that look kinda like a small broom, would make a nice
substitute for those squeamish about getting up to their elbows in their food.

I think, though, that the method I described would work better for whole, unskimmed,
and unhomogenized milk than for cream, since there is more to it that is not a
potential part of the butter, so there is more room for butter to float to the top.
Otherwise you'd end up skimming maybe eighty percent of your liquid away, which gets
difficult after a certain point.

I suspect this is something the average person knows little enough about to make
experimentation the way to go, especially if one has access to inexpensive milk or
cream, and some time to kill while everyone is away at Pennsic.

Me, I'm gonna make some almond butter, and then see if the method works for bean
butter, to which Andrew Boorde refers but doesn't describe in any detail.

Adamantius
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com


============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================