306 CHURNING 



must be stopped when the butter-granules are still very small, 

 excessive loss of fat may be avoided by allowing the churning 

 to rest undisturbed for about ten minutes. This gives the smaller 

 granules an opportunity to rise to the surface and adhere to 

 the butter. 



Overchurning, that is, the formation of large granules or 

 lumps, is objectionable, because of the excessive incorporation 

 of buttermilk which may prove injurious to the keeping quality 

 of the butter. In the case of churning cream of a poor quality, 

 this incorporation of buttermilk is especially objectionable, be- 

 cause of its tendency to give the butter an unclean, coarse and 

 rank flavor and to hasten fermentations in the butter detri- 

 mental to its quality. In the case of poor cream, therefore, it 

 is important to stop the churn when the granules are still 

 small, consistent with reasonable exhaustiveness of churning. 

 In this case the buttermilk will drain off readily and can be 

 washed out thoroughly. Butter from poor cream should ba 

 drained well and washed in several lots of water. Overchurn-^ 

 ing may also cause injury to the body of the butter. If the 

 butter granules are very soft, overchtirning is difficult to avoid, 

 because of the very rapid coalescence and lumping together of 

 the granules after the breaking point has been reached. 



Some buttermakers practice overchurning for the purpose 

 of incorporating moisture in the butter. The popular concep- 

 tion, that overchurning causes the finished butter to be high 

 in moisture, is not well founded and would hold good only iu 

 the case of very soft butter. When the churning temperature 

 is at all normal and the butter granules are reasonably firm, 

 as they should be, there is no tangible reason why large gran- 

 ules should make butter containing more moisture than small 

 granules. The supposition is that the large granules lock up 

 a great deal of moisture. Experimental data do not bear this 

 out. On the contrary, they suggest that overchurning, if it 

 has. any effect at all on the moisture content of the finished 

 product, tends to pound the moisture out of the butter. 



