.
tongueriver wrote: ↑Sun Jun 21, 2020 9:06 pm When fresh milk is allowed to sit the heaviest cream rises naturally to the top and can be skimmed. If additional lighter creams are desired to be separated there are machines that do this by centrifugal force. What you have is a small-scale device to churn butter from cream. The lid is galvanized steel. The wooden pieces are called paddles. Most of them are made to fit the one-gallon size jars. Today butter is very expensive. Part of the reason is that almost all of the former dairy cattle breeds (guerseys, jerseys) are gone which produced good amounts of cream. Today's cattle are almost all holsteins and produce massive amounts of very low-fat milk. They are digitally monitored to their production by the closest ounce and when production falls to a certain level the animal goes straight to the fast-food joints for hamburgers. Cows need to be refreshed occasionally by breeding and dropping a calf. If the calf is male it is usually sold for veal or whatever. Some in genetically superior herds become breeder bulls. There is hardly any hamburger sold by fast food places that is from beef cattle. When I was a boy in the 1950s we had a guernsey cow Annabelle which produced milk which was one third cream of various densities. The milk was yellow from butterfat. Today's milk from the store is basically water with protein.
.
.
. Yup, there's no comparison between homemade, and store bought butter... Like food in general. The fresher/more natural it is, the better it will be, with few exceptions (jarred peanut butter is almost always better then homemade).
Very well explained. I had the good fortune as a kid to spend school holidays on a Jersey dairy farm. I had home made butter made from the milk/cream straight out of the vat before being picked up by the milk tanker. Untill you've had it, you do not know what real butter is. I would hazard a guess that less than .00001% of the population have ever had real milk let alone butter.tongueriver wrote: ↑Sun Jun 21, 2020 9:06 pm When fresh milk is allowed to sit the heaviest cream rises naturally to the top and can be skimmed. If additional lighter creams are desired to be separated there are machines that do this by centrifugal force. What you have is a small-scale device to churn butter from cream. The lid is galvanized steel. The wooden pieces are called paddles. Most of them are made to fit the one-gallon size jars. Today butter is very expensive. Part of the reason is that almost all of the former dairy cattle breeds (guerseys, jerseys) are gone which produced good amounts of cream. Today's cattle are almost all holsteins and produce massive amounts of very low-fat milk. They are digitally monitored to their production by the closest ounce and when production falls to a certain level the animal goes straight to the fast-food joints for hamburgers. Cows need to be refreshed occasionally by breeding and dropping a calf. If the calf is male it is usually sold for veal or whatever. Some in genetically superior herds become breeder bulls. There is hardly any hamburger sold by fast food places that is from beef cattle. When I was a boy in the 1950s we had a guernsey cow Annabelle which produced milk which was one third cream of various densities. The milk was yellow from butterfat. Today's milk from the store is basically water with protein.
Here's the churn that we used many years ago when we milked a cow. The gears are open and not enclosed as the one that Willy pictured. The little wooden device next to the churn is an old butter mold.treefarmer wrote: ↑Mon Jun 22, 2020 1:25 am We too have a similar churn, the gears are open not in a housing as the one Willy has. Ours came from my mother-in-law. We milked several cows when our children were young. We had a Holstein and has been mentioned, the milk was not very rich in butter fat. Some folks called the Holstein milk, “blue John”. The last cow we milked was a Jersey Ayrshire cross, she allowed us to make lots of butter that was delicious. It was a lot of work but we were young and adventurous. (When we get home I’ll post a picture of the churn and the special shaped glass jar.)
When I was a little feller, the butter was made in a big tall ceramic churn that had a wooden dasher that passed through hole in the lid. The up and down motion caused the butter to form in the room temperature milk.
My 96 year old father-in-law tells about the days when he was a “cow hunter”, how he would put a quart mason jar full of old milk in his saddle bags and by supper time in the woods, he would have something called “clabber” to eat along with whatever was cooked for supper. By the way, the name “cow hunter” is the old Florida name for cowboy.
Treefarmer
. .
.