How do you keep butter from having a sour taste and smell. I use fresh cream. I rinse well under cold water and try to get water and milk all out. Is there some special trick.

-- Terri central Texas (tnorskie@n-link.com), February 07, 2002

Answers

What does the milk taste like? Butterfat can taste bad from a ruminent diet high in cottenseed meals or oils, and also linseed oil. Just like with cheese tasting bad, milk tastes bad, milk is condensed to make the cheese, so the cheese tastes worse :) If you don't get all the milk out of your butter it will go bad faster, but it should taste fine. Vicki

-- Vicki McGaugh TX (vickilonesomedoe@hotmail.com), February 07, 2002.

Have you tryed working it with cold towels, after rinsing?

-- Thumper/inOKC (slrldr@yahoo.com), February 07, 2002.

I've had this happen many times, and it doesn't matter how much you rinse, or anything else... it's the cow. Some cows produce sour tasting milk, and it smells sour too. Try to make butter from a jersey cow, you will get better cream and better butter. Also, I find that cows that are confined make yucky butter. Mary

-- Mary Fraley (kmfraley@orwell.net), February 07, 2002.

Please double-check how much and in what way you are rinsing - it takes a lot more than one rinse - more like about five changes of water as a minimum to get rid of everything which could turn sour. This could be explained most simply by rinsing which for some reason isn't working.

I'll allow, though, that taints from what the animals are eating can come through strongly and be most pernicious - there were about three weeks in spring we couldn't even bring ourselves to drink our cow's milk because of a weed that was flowering then.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), February 08, 2002.

Terri,

I would like to offer a different opinion. In my opinion there is likely nothing wrong with your butter at all. Let me explain.

For butter to start tasting sour after a few days is a normal, traditional event. Up until about 1940, when butter was mostly pasteurized and highly processed, people's butter was almost always sour tasting. Only those who lived on a dairy farm ate consistently sweet butter. People purchased butter from the grocery that ALREADY tasted sour, it was sour when they bought it and when they ate it, only they were not bothered by it being "sour". To them it was "normal".

The modern processes of using genetically modified animals, pasteurizing, chilling, and adding salt have created a perverted butter with a non-sour taste. Over time people have gotten used to this non-sour-but-salty taste and have even come to expect the non- sour-but-salty taste. When they taste traditional, sour-tasting butter, they now assume that there is something wrong.

If you put a great deal of effort into getting the sour taste out of your butter you will likely be adulterating a healthy food into an unhealthy food. The challenge is to accept the fact that today's "butter" is not the real butter. Try to enjoy the real butter: unpasteurized, loaded with healthy bacteria, not processed, and with a nice sour-but-not-salty taste.

Enjoy.

-- Rick#7 (rick7@postmark.net), February 08, 2002.