Butter fat products

Multiple butter fat products, including butter oils, anhydrous butter fat, butter fat-vegetable oil blends, and fractionated butter fats, are manufactured around the world today. In the past, butter fat in the form of butter was the primary preservation technique. Today, the preferred preservation method involves the processing of butter fat to the anhydrous butter oil state, then hermetically packaging under nitrogen to substantially increase the shelf life and reduce the incidence of degradation. 

Butter-like products with reduced-fat content are manufactured in several countries. Stabilizers, milk and soy proteins, sodium albumin or caseinate, fatty acids, and other additives are used. A product is now available on a commercial scale in the former U.S.S.R. that has the following composition 45% milkfat, 10% nonfat solids, and 45% moisture. It has a shelf life of 10 days at 5°C (91). Each country has established its own standards for butter and butter fat products. Many are still developing standards for a reduced-fat butter product to meet the growing consumer demand. 

The most difficult property of fat to replace is flavor. Great expenditure of effort has gone into producing a tme butter flavor as flavor boosters in nondairy fat products and in dairy products including milk, cream, butter, and ice cream. Results have led to a successful dupHcation of buttery flavors which closely match the intended target. 

Emulsions are mixture of two (or more) immiscible substances. Everyday common examples are milk, butter (fats, water, salts), margarine, mayonnaise, skin creams, and others. In butter and margarine, the continuous phase consists of lipids. These lipids surround the water droplets (water-in-oil emulsion). All technical emulsions are prepared by some kind of mechanical agitation or mixing. Remarkably, the natural product, milk, is made by organisms without any agitation inside the mammary glands. 

Lipolysed milk fat products can serve as cream-like/butter-like flavouring agents [19]. 

Acidity. The development of a fishy flavor in butter is well known. Cream acidities ranging from 0.20 to 0.30% appear to represent those levels at which flavor development is marginal (Parks 1974). Although the development of fishy flavors in unsalted butters is rarely encountered, it is not restricted to those products containing salt. Pont et al. (1960) induced the development of a fishy flavor in commercial butter-fat by the addition of nordihydroguaiaretic acid and citric or lactic acid. In addition, Tarassuk et al. (1959) reported the development of fishy flavors in washed cream adjusted to pH 4.6. 

Lipids strongly influence, for good or evil, the flavour and texture of foods, especially high-fat products such as butter. The influence of various colloidal features of milk fat on the properties of milk and cream is considered in Chapter 4, while the crystallization of milk fat and how this may be controlled, modified and measured are reviewed in Chapter 5. Unfortunately, lipids are subject to chemical and enzymatic alterations which can cause flavour defects referred to as oxidative and hydrolytic rancidity, respectively. The storage stability of high-fat foods, especially mildly flavoured foods like milk, cream and butter, is strongly influenced by these changes which have been reviewed in Chapters 6 and 7. 

Not all fat products have been reformulated for 0 trans labels. Margarines must contain 80 percent fat, just like butter. Both have been largely replaced by spreads, or lite spreads, which contain lower amount of fat a far majority of spreads claim 0 trans Many home makers prefer to cook or bake with the higher fat content margarines, or (100% fat) shortenings, which often show positive trans fat content on their labels. 

Margarine is one of the major temperature-profiled fat products. It was invented in France in 1869 intentionally as a butter substitute, and was first produced in the United States in 1873. Originally, it was made from animal fat coconut oil became the lead fat in margarine in 1917, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil in 1934, and partially hydrogenated soybean oil in 1956. Various legal... 

The production of fat spreads as an alternative to butter led to an increased demand for solid fats. For the most part, this demand has been met by the use of partially hydrogenated vegetable oUs (Section 8.3), but concern about the health effects of trani-unsaturated acids has raised interest in an alternative way of producing fats with the required melting behavior. This can be achieved by interesterification of blends of natural or fractionated fats. Products obtained in this way will probably contain more saturated acids than their partially hydrogenated equivalents, but they will have no trans-acids. This section is devoted to interesterification carried out under the influence of a chemical catalyst (177, 186, 187). Similar reactions with enzymes are discussed in the following section. 

Solvents. The use of organic solvents, such as acetone, in the laboratory has proven to be an effective method for removal of milkfat components, including cholesterol. Unfortunately, this method creates regulatory and negative consumer perceptions due to the potential of solvent residues in the natural butter/butter fat-containing products. 

Composition control of the butter fat content has received much attention in the ever present drive to maximize returns and create highly consistent products. As noted, multiple technologies are under development to standardize and simplify... 

An increasing problem is lipolysis in butter fat after manufacturing, which is caused by thermoresistant hpase enzymes that are created in the milk or cream by psycho-trophic bacteria or by residual native lipases that sirrvive pasteurization. Based on a determination of the lipase activity in cream, the keeping quality of manufactured butter in regard to hpolysis can be predicted with reasonable accirracy. A similar prediction for sweet cream butter can be based on lipase activity in the serum phase (71). The characteristic lipolytic flavors that can develop in milk products are primarily associated with the short- and medium-chain fatty acids that are relatively abundant in milkfat they have lower flavor threshold values than the long-chain fatty acids. As a result of improvements in the quality of raw milk and the standards of processing, lipolytic rancidity is seldom present in the fat source before its use in recombination (72). 

Very low-fat spreads have recently been developed. The first European commercialized product was made by St. Ivel and is called St. Ivel s Lowest. It contains 25% butter fat and has a lower saturated fat content than sunflower margarine (129). 

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