why can’t you make cream by mixing (butter)milk and butter?

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Butter is made by churning cream, which causes all the fat molecules to clump together (creating butter) and leaves buttermilk as a side product.

Following this logic, why can’t you make cream again when you combine butter and buttermilk? Or even butter and regular milk for that matter

In: Chemistry

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Cream is an emulsion of fats and water. Each globule of fat lipid has a protein membrane surrounding it, keeping them from clumping with the others. When you churn butter, what you are doing is breaking those membranes which allows the fats to clump together as butter and separate from the water based buttermilk.

Trying to put them back together is figuratively trying to take the bull out of the china shop, and literally trying to mix oil and water.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Commercial buttermilk – what you buy at the store – isn’t the same as the buttermilk left over from butter churning.

Commercial buttermilk is actually skim milk (or similar) that has had bacterial cultures added to it so it _slightly_ ferments. That is what gives it the traditional tangy flavor.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You can make cream with butter and milk. 2 parts whole milk, 1 part melted butter, whip until it forms soft peaks. Ideally, you’d want a stand/hand mixer because it takes quite a lot of whipping.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You can, but it would be a tremendous pain in the ass. You would need to melt the butter and have the milk warm enough to not firm it all back up. Then you’d need a ton of agitation to emulsify it. Labs use a tool for this using a piston to create cavitations that would most likely do the trick.

So yes, you can do it in principle.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think in theory you *could* but you’d need to undo the clumping process. Once the milkfat as been churned to butter, it won’t just dissolve back evenly into milk. If you put it through a homogenization process it would essentially turn back into regular, creamy milk.