Butter. Technology of "Vologda" butter for dummies: How to make butter yourself How much butter comes out of 1 liter of milk

Is it possible to make "Vologda oil" yourself?

Why not?

You will be with your grandmother in the Vologda region in the summer, or simply come as tourists to Vologda, Gryazovetsky, Mezhdurechensky, Totemsky or some other area of ​​\u200b\u200btraditional Vologda animal husbandry, stay for a day, turn off your mobile phone to your fucking hair dryer, live a quiet life of a villager and make some oil with your own hands .

For this you need:

1. Refrigerator or cellar.

2. Separator or low wide containers with a lid, glass or enamelled. The Bumans used wooden or tin basins, you can use enamel pots.

3. Large enamel pan and gas stove for pasteurization.

4. Butter churn. The Bumans had it, but you hardly need to acquire it.

5. And, of course, you need a cow of a local breed, and a mistress who milks you. Of course, you can try it yourself, but I doubt very much that you will be able to milk the required amount the first time.

It is better to free the refrigerator from other products, especially with specific odors (herring, sausage), and if this cannot be done, then put all the products in double plastic bags. The refrigerator must first be washed with soda and dried thoroughly before turning on.

So - from the evening milking, collect some milk from cows that grazed in a meadow with traditional Vologda forbs. (From milk from cows that ate silage or compound feed - "Vologda" oil will not work.

Now into the separator or settling tanks. (I note that in the past, separation was carried out at a temperature of 35 - 37 degrees).

To obtain cream by settling for Vologda butter (sweet cream), milk must be settled at a temperature of about 12 degrees for 12 to 18 hours.

If you want to get a little more oil, stand longer, 24, 36 hours, but then you will get peasant or Holstein oil, and not Vologda oil.

Now - the cream needs to be removed, which is more convenient to do with a “sour cream” or “sauce” spoon, which is similar in shape to a “Shvartsev” scoop for removing cream (in the figure). You can just use a large wooden spoon, while trying not to "hook" the milk.

As a result, you should get cream with a fat content of 24-28%, which you will pasteurize.

And here, as they say, options are possible, which was noted at the beginning of the 20th century in the article by F. Galenius “Dairy farming and cattle breeding. A few words about the production of Parisian oil.

I quote: “Milk obtained from cows fed with good feed gives a good aroma at 72 R (90 ° C), while herbal milk (spring pasture) exhibits aroma at 68 R (85 ° C). But milk obtained from cows kept on poor food, as well as new and old milk, gives a relatively good flavor only at a temperature of 75 - 76 R (94 - 95 ° C). The cream is heated for at least 10 minutes and no more than 50 minutes.

How do you do it? Of course, you can't just put a pot of cream on the stove. On the stove you need to put a tank with hot water, and already in it - a container with cream.

So - cream, depending on the quality, is pasteurized at a temperature of 85 - 95 degrees for 3 - 5 to 50 minutes, then quickly cooled to 2 - 6 degrees, and at this temperature the cream should ripen for 5-7 hours. (At the beginning of the 20th century, cream matured for 8 to 18 hours). During this time, they need to be mixed 3-4 times with a clean wooden spatula or spoon for 3 minutes.

(A little secret - you can quickly cool the cream with a salt-ice mixture. You can experiment in winter by mixing salt with snow, only carefully, not with your hands, since the temperature drops to minus 18 degrees. Here in this mixture, where ice or snow is prepared with salt, and lower the tub or pan of hot pasteurized cream to cool.)

Now - knockdown.

Bumans did this in a churn, which was a horizontally located barrel with a volume of 100 liters with a mechanical drive, with a hermetically sealed hatch and an observation window. About 40 liters of cream with a temperature of 7-12 degrees were poured into this churn, previously washed with hot and then cold water. (To be precise, for 100 liters of volume - 38 liters of cream). Rotation - from 60 times per minute (Dutch) to 90 - 120 times per minute according to the Holstein method (Bumans).

At home, you can churn butter in a three-five-liter jar with a screw cap, filled no more than half. (Ideally, one-third). If more - the oil will churn too long, if less - too quickly. In both cases, the quality of the oil will be so low that it will be impossible to call it "Vologda".

How to shoot down? You can - manually, in turn, shaking the jar with the whole family. You can - rolling the jar on the table. For the first five minutes of knocking down, open the lid a couple of times, releasing air. The total churning time is 45-60 minutes, depending on the temperature and effort involved. The result will be visible - the cream will brighten significantly, becoming almost transparent, and grains of butter the size of buckwheat will form. The resulting buttermilk is drained through gauze or a sieve, and the butter is molded, squeezing out excess moisture. It is possible - even directly with your hands, but it is better with wooden spatulas, ideally with alder ones, from time to time removing drops of moisture with a clean cloth. (Each time, a cloth or a piece of gauze should be washed in hot, then in cold water and wring out).

“Oil must be squeezed out until a transparent dew or tear appears on it, which stands out very noticeably if you cut a piece of squeezed oil with a spatula.”

If in numbers, then the water in the "Parisian" or "Vologda" oil should be 10 - 15%.

Well, now a pack of "Vologda oil" bought in a store doesn't seem so expensive to you? Of course, now, on modern equipment, the techniques for making "Vologda oil" are completely different.

Now milk passes through a plate heat exchanger, then into a separator, where cream is separated, and again through pipes to a cooler, into a tubular pasteurizer, and cream is again separated at a temperature of 75 degrees, then into a butter former, where the cream is simultaneously cooled to 18 - 22 degrees , and a process similar to churning oil occurs. Similar is not a random word. Even in the modern, high-tech "continuous" way of making "Vologda" oil, the process of oil formation remains mysterious, similar to the alchemical manipulation of substances, with the help of spells and the philosopher's stone.

"The conversion of high-fat cream into butter in a buttermaker is a complex physico-chemical process that is not fully understood."

(V. Tverdokhleb and others. Vologda Buttermaking)

In general, oil flows out of a plate or cylindrical oil former, which immediately solidifies in the molds, but what happens inside ...

It is as much a mystery as the process of making milk in a cow's udder.

In a lamellar or cylindrical butter former, pasteurized cream can be added to the butter emulsion so that an oil of a certain fat content comes out at the outlet of the lamellar or cylindrical butter former. The oil, taken on a sample on a wooden spatula, should solidify approximately 40 seconds after leaving the buttermaker. If not, it means that the oil has been in the apparatus for too long, and will be too soft and fusible.

* * *
The question is whether it is possible to make "Vologda oil", say, in Altai or in the Volgograd region. Craps!

In the Volgograd region, even black-and-white cows brought from the Vologda region will give milk either meadow or steppe, depending on the location of the pasture. Accordingly, the oil obtained here will be meadow or steppe.

What's on a cow's tongue...

A long, long time ago, people noticed that the taste, smell and even shade of milk depend on what the cow eats. So they said - what a cow has on its tongue, then it is in milk. Witches and village sorcerers used this to “spoil” the cow, and then rid the milk of an unpleasant odor, receiving a reward and strengthening authority for that. For example, it was possible to throw a few heads of garlic soaked in salt water to the cow, and then smear something else on the inside of the pail and lids that were drying on the fence, and the milk took on an unpleasant, and most importantly, an incomprehensible smell. (Experienced housewives could recognize the garlic smell, which required a masking additive).

And the reasons for many of the so-called flaws in milk and butter lie in the composition of their feed, which has long been noted by shepherds, and experienced milk housewives could determine where a cow was grazing today: if a cow goes to the pasture hungry early in the morning and eats “snowdrops” (several types of perennial anemones), the milk will acquire a grassy bitter taste and a slight reddish tint. Lupine, field mustard, vetch grains give bitterness to milk, and wormwood gives a characteristic taste of bitterness of “steppe” butter. "Frog grass" (water pepper) - and the milk becomes bluish, from Ivan da Marya - bluish. "Oil grass" (fatty) - and milk becomes sticky and viscous.

Feed swede increases milk yield, but a large amount produces a bitter taste and a characteristic smell. Carrots are a source of carotene, but if you give them more, the milk becomes orange. Beet tops should not be fed fresh, otherwise the milk quickly turns sour. (And if you dry it for several days, then the oxalic acid evaporates).

Wild garlic, onions, turnips, cabbage, wormwood - give the milk a smell, and when fed with potato pulp (waste of starch production), the milk becomes watery. From sour feed, from the cabbage leaf, the fat content of milk decreases, and from oatmeal, legumes, clover, as well as wheat bran and ground barley, the fat content increases.

Corn grains and mixed fodder based on it make the oil softer, and the peas harder. Cake (linen, sunflower and cotton) changes the structure of milk proteins, and it does not coagulate well when rennet is added.

If you feed a cow with hay from low-lying meadows, from swamps, then do not expect fat milk, but hay from the herbs of flood meadows gives excellent milk. It is not recommended to give dairy cows more than 1.5 kg of fishmeal per day, otherwise the milk will acquire a characteristic fishy smell.

And clean, odorless water should be plenty, at a temperature of 14 - 16 degrees in summer, and heated - in winter.

Even the ambient temperature matters - if the barn is hot and humid, then the fat content of the milk decreases.

And now let's see what the nature of the Vologda Oblast offers to feed dairy cows?

“The specifics of the forage base of the Vologda Oblast is primarily determined by the abundance of meadows, the share of which currently amounts to 27.3% of all agricultural land, while the main part of the meadows for cutting and pasture use (98.2%) is located on normal and temporarily excessively moist upland.

Absolutely unique is the botanical composition of meadow grasses, which includes both cereals and legumes in optimal proportions. The main types of cereal meadow plants are: meadow fescue, meadow timothy, cocksfoot, from legumes the most common are meadow and creeping clover, meadow rank. This ensures the production of green mass, suitable both for eating by animals on the pasture, and for preparing various types of succulent and roughage, combining a sufficient amount of energy and nutrients with a high degree of digestibility, which provides the necessary conditions for the synthesis of milk with high technological properties suitable for the production of "Vologda Oil" (Olga Kotova).

In 1899, at the Dairy Exhibition in St. Petersburg, this was especially noted by English dairy experts: “The British experts expressed the wish that at future exhibitions butter from various areas, so different from each other in terms of the quality of pasture and grass, such as, for example, the north of Russia and Siberia, were exhibited separately, because it is difficult to compare them due to the difference in taste, ability to store and different distances from the market.

(V. N. Vereshchagin)

“Cabbage and beet leaves and large herbs are ensiled in a huge vat dug into the ground, sprinkled with salt. Feed this food little by little. This magnificent milk is an aphrodisiac. Vereshchagin does not like Barda. The milk is liquid, almost non-fat, the cheese is bad, the cow wears out quickly. The slightest acid in the bard - cheese and butter are very bad.

(I. Kolyshko, Vereshchagin school and cheese making artels)

“The approximate diet of a cow when kept in a stall should be as follows: meadow hay - 8 kg, spring straw - 4, grass silage - 5, potatoes - 4, fodder beets - 3, red fodder carrots - 2, food waste - 8, bread residues - 0.5, wheat bran - 1 kg. In addition, the cow needs salt - about 70 g per day. In summer, an adult cow is entitled to about 50 kg of green fodder per day. A cow cannot eat more than half a centner of grass per day, so if the milk yield is above 12 liters, feed the animal with something extra, such as food waste.

(M. Grigoryeva, veterinarian)

From the point of view of a veterinarian - maybe right. With such a diet, it is quite possible that a cow will feel good, and there will be a lot of milk, but Vologda butter will not come out of this milk.

In general, the same as with record-breaking cows, which give tens of tons of white liquid a year, and our cows, which give little, but fragrant, fatty milk.

Theoretically, of course, one can imagine how hay is brought from the Vologda Oblast to the south, where it is soaked in cold water, doused with steam, and after that the Vologda cows are fed with Vologda fodder in order to obtain an oil similar to "Vologda" as a result ...

Chukhon oil

Afraid of the complexities of many vessels for cream settling, you can churn butter from milk using traditional technology. To do this, you need to collect the milk of the evening milk yield (which stood for 36 hours) and the morning milk yield (24 hours), pour it into an enameled bucket or tank and keep it in a warm place until it turns slightly sour. After that, sour cream is removed from the curdled milk, and butter can already be churned from it.

Churning butter from milk

My friend in the village, when he was transporting milk in a tank to a collection point 20 kilometers from the farm, lowered an alder or aspen log into the tank on a rope, and in the evening he took out the same log from the tank, which became heavier by half a kilogram of excellent butter.

A scam, of course, but the oil turned out excellent!

But - not "Vologda"!

What am I for?

Even if our milk is taken to Moscow or St. Petersburg, then real “Vologda butter” cannot be made! For half a thousand miles of turbulence, the milk will simply churn, and no matter how you pasteurize it after that, no matter how you turn it in the butter-formers, you won’t roll the minced meat back.

70 - 100 kilometers of transportation is the maximum that our milk can withstand without irreversible biochemical and mechanical processes. Actually, it was quite recently, when the entire Vologda region was covered with a network of oil refineries.

And one more thing - the oil that you yourself bring down under the exact observance of all conditions will be guaranteed to be of higher quality and tastier than the oil obtained by the continuous oil formation method.

Just do not be lazy, and remember - 40% of the working time in the manufacture of butter should be spent on washing dishes and equipment. As detergents, it is better to use mustard powder and baking soda.