280 SALTING AND WORKING OF BUTTER 



The causes and remedies for mottles are pretty thoroughly 

 understood by almost all up-to-date butter-makers. Twenty 

 or twenty-five years ago mottles constituted one of the leading 

 defects found in the creamery butter supplied to our markets. 

 Charles Y. Knight, then editor of Chicago Dairy Produce, 

 offered a series of prizes for the best methods of preventing 

 mottled butter, and many creamerymen entered the competition. 

 The result was that a lot of valuable information was obtained, 

 which resulted to a very large extent in preventing mottled but- 

 ter. Many theories have been advanced as to both the cause and 

 the remedy for mottles. 



Long before creameries were established some fanners' 

 wives had mastered the art of butter-making to the ex tent* that 

 they produced butter of a uniform quality free from mottles. 

 This was accomplished by their methods of working. Possibly 

 they had no knowledge of what actually caused mottles, but 

 they knew that if they worked the butter sufficiently to thor- 

 oughly incorporate the salt mottles would not appear in the fin- 

 ished butter. 



Drs. Van Slyke and Hart say that if the proteids are thor- 

 oughly washed from the butter, mottles cannot be produced, no 

 matter how unevenly the salt is distributed. Complete removal 

 of the buttermilk by washing is one of the essentials in preventing 

 mottles in butter. 



Storch made an extensive study of the causes of mottles 

 in butter. He claims that the water in butter is present in 

 two forms or conditions. There is the water which is con- 

 tained in the form of an extremely fine emulsion in the nitro- 

 genous material composing the film surrounding the fat globules ; 

 and there is the water which is enclosed by the granules as they 

 form or is picked up later from the buttermilk or the wash- water, 

 and which is present in the finished butter in the form of larger 

 droplets, or a much coarser emulsion. The whitish, opaque 

 dapples, Storch claims, are due to the fine emulsion of water 

 in the nitrogenous material referred to, and the yellow, clearer 

 markings to the larger droplets of water picked up from the 

 buttermilk and wash-water. 



