Whipping properties of cream in relation to milk composition

Summary

Dietary manipulation was used to produce a similar series of milks from both Friesian and Jersey cows. The gross compositions of the milks, the fatty acid (FA) composition of the milk fats, the distribution of molecular sizes in the triglycerides of the milk fat, the melting properties of the milk fats, and the whipping properties of creams containing 360 and 400 g fat/kg were measured. Changes in gross composition and FA composition were as expected from the use of dietary oil supplements, but it was established that the mathematical relation between 18:0 and 18:1 differed between breeds, the Jersey yielding a milk fat with a lower proportion of 18:1 for a given value of 18:0. Control diets free from added fat produced milk fats with essentially unimodal triglyceride distributions, whereas fatrich diets produced bimodal distributions. The slight differences in these distributions between breeds were merely a reflection of variations in FA composition rather than in synthetic procedures. Differences in the whipping properties of creams containing 360 and 400 g fat/kg were consistent with literature observations. Dietary manipulation had little effect on the whipping properties of creams derived from Friesian cows, but caused considerable changes in the corresponding properties of the creams from Jersey cows. The only property that behaved similarly in the creams from the two breeds was the butter time, i.e. the time taken for butter granules to form on prolonged whipping of the cream. A major determinant of the butter time appeared to be the proportion of the fat that was molten at the temperature at which the whipping experiments were carried out.