WHEN TO STOP CHURNING 349 



is used for the purpose of maintaining a reasonable degree of 

 uniformity in color throughout the entire year or, in other words, 

 to make butter look like butter, the year round, not like butter 

 in summer and lard in winter. 



Gas (carbon dioxide) develops in cream with the growth 

 of the bacteria, which is released with a few revolutions of the 

 churn. In all tightly closed barrel churns the gas should be 

 given opportunity to escape once, and usually twice. 



The speed of churn should be as rapid as possible and still 

 secure the maximum of concussion or pounding of the cream 

 within. This naturally will vary with the thinness of the 

 cream and the amount in the churn. 



At this point in the process the churning should be con- 

 tinued evenly until the globules of fat have assembled into 

 granules and the granules grown to be sufficiently large for 

 easy and thorough removal. 



When to Stop Churning. — If the churning process is con- 

 tinued too long the butter will gather into larger and yet 

 larger lumps until finally the entire mass is in one or two 

 great chunks or balls. Such butter is over-churned and has 

 incorporated throughout its entire mass a large quantity of but- 

 termilk. The butter maker at this point is faced with the 

 option of either permitting the buttermilk to remain in the 

 butter mass and there sour and produce a poor butter, or of 

 squeezing and working the buttermilk out, which process 

 is very liable to produce a greasy butter with poor grain and 

 weak body. To obviate both these difficulties the churning 

 process should be stopped when the granules of butter have 

 reached the size of a kernel of wheat or cracked com. If the 

 cream has been ripened sufficiently to render the casein brittle 

 and if the temperature of the cream and the fat within it has 

 been such that the particles of fat can stick together when they 

 do touch, the process of churning need not have consumed 

 more than twenty minutes. To churn with a hand churn more 

 than twenty to twenty-five minutes is a waste of labor. Where 

 a larger churn driven by power is used it is preferable to 

 cool the cream to such a temperature that the butter will not 

 come in less than about thirty minutes nor more than forty-five. 



