338 SAI/TING THE BUTTER 



If stored in a very cold place and not given a chance to 

 warm up by being taken into the creamery long enough before 

 use, the salt chills the butter with which it comes in immediate 

 contact and thereby hinders ready solution and uniform dis- 

 tribution of the brine. Where the storage place of the salt 

 is very cold, as is often the case in creameries in winter where 

 the salt is stored in a shed, the salt needed for the next day 

 should be brought into the creamery the previous day, or long 

 enough before use, to allow it to temper, in order to avoid 

 the undesirable consequences of the use of very cold salt. 



Effect of Salt on the Keeping Quality of Butter. The anti- 

 septic properties of salt are generally recognized. Salt has 

 the power of inhibiting bacteriological growth. It would seem, 

 therefore, that salted butter should possess greater keeping 

 quality than unsalted butter and that the more salt butter con- 

 tains the better it should keep. 



Jensen 1 reports that all micro-organisms grow better and 

 faster in unsalted butter than in salted butter. The growth 

 of the water bacteria is retarted most by the salt. Klein 2 says 

 that although butter is primarily salted to improve its flavor, 

 its keeping quality is also materially improved. Weigman 3 

 found that salt has a conserving action, that unsalted butter 

 generally contains more microorganisms than salted butter and 

 that in unsalted butter the multiplication of bacteria lasts longer 

 than in salted butter. His experimental results show that in 

 unsalted butter the multiplication lasted 106 days as against 62 

 days in salted butter. McKay and Larsen's 4 experiments show 

 that salt improves the keeping quality of butter. Rahn, Brown 

 and Smith 5 who stored salted and unsalted butter at 6 C. 

 and -(-6 C. state that there is no hope of keeping unsalted 

 butter longer than salted butter. Fettig, 6 in experiments in 

 which butter was stored at similar temperatures as above, con- 

 cluded, that salted butter keeps better, both above and below 

 the freezing point, than unsalted butter. 



1 Jensen, Die Bakteriologie der Milchwirtschaft, 1913, p. 124. 



2 Klein, Milchwirtschaft, 1914, p. 218. 

 Weigmann, Mykologie der Milch, 1911, p. 210. 



* McKay and Larsen, The Keeping Quality of Butter, Iowa Bulletin 71, 1903. 

 6 Rahn, Brown and Smith, Keeping Quality of Butter, Michigan Technical 



Bulletin 2, 1909. 



Fettig, Centralblatt fur Bakt. II. Band 22, No. 32, 1909. 



