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Treatment of Cream for the Removal of Objectionable Flavors and Odors¹

Blue Valley Creamery Company, Chicago, Illinois

ABSTRACT

1. The key-note to permanent improvement of the quality of American butter lies in better cream. Those sections in this country and those foreign countries that have established a reputation for butter of superior quality are invariably also the sections and countries that foster the production of good cream on the farm. Butter is no better than the cream from which it is made.
   
2. In sections where the herds are small and limited to but a few cows, economic conditions seriously handicap the establishment of conditions essential to the production of cream of high quality. This renders progress in cream improvement slow. Cream from such sections often contain diverse off-flavors. Among these flavor defects seasonal feed and weed flavors, flavors absorbed from foreign substances, and fermentation flavors of varying degrees of intensity are of common occurrence.
   
3. Many of these off-flavors are volatile or volatilizable. It is possible, by intensive treatment of this cream, to remove the volatile and volatilizable flavors and odors and to thereby improve the quality of the cream and raise the score and market value of the resulting butter.
   
4. The treatment that has been found most effective in removing off-flavors from cream for buttermaking consists briefly of standardizing the cream to a reasonably low, definite point of acidity, flash pasteurizing it and spraying it into a high vacuum, then blowing heated air through a continuous spray of the hot cream while still maintaining a partial vacuum until the cream is free from all removable off-flavors, as determined by drawing samples from the vacuum apparatus.
   
5. The time necessary for this treatment varies with type and intensity of flavor defect, it ranges from instantaneous treatment, in which the cream passes from the pasteurizer through the vacuum and cooler into the holding tank in one continuous operation, to intermittent or batch treatment in which the cream is held and treated under vacuum for from fifteen to thirty minutes and even longer in extreme cases.
   
6. In order to avoid all danger of premature churning and insure butter with a smooth texture free from mealiness, it is necessary to keep the cream in motion until cooled and to cool it rapidly and without excessive agitation.
   
7. While the application of this method of removing flavors from cream for buttermaking has been reduced to commercially successful and practical operation, some of the technical phenomena encountered in this work require further study for satisfactory explanation of the scientific principles involved. The most important of these are: The ratio of evaporation, the behavior of individual flavors, conditions controlling their volatilization, and the physical changes of the fat units. These problems are now under investigation and their solution promises the revelation of additional interesting and valuable scientific facts.
   

¹ Address at Annual Meeting of American Dairy Science Association