Just recieved raw butter...could it be spoiled?

[jeanneji]

I joined a buying club and just picked up my first order. Everything seems as I would expect it...except the butter. It smells sourish/cheesey. I am wondering if this is how it is normally. I bought a few tubs..they are all the same. I can live without it if this is normal and just stick with olive oil.

Jeanne

[Raw Kyle]

Is it cultured butter?

[Michael]

The butter sounds rancid to me.  I wouldn't touch it!  Fresh raw butter, in my experience, has no smell at all.  Cultured butter smells (and tastes!) absolutely delicious so I wouldn't think that it's simply cultured butter.  I wouldn't suggest eschewing butter altogether because of this bad experience. 

Cultured butter can be stored much longer than modern 'sweet' butter without going rancid so is highly recommended although difficult to obtain.  I used to regularly buy a raw, cultured french butter which was divine but I'm afraid I can't recall the name of it now as I no longer consume any dairy.

[jeanneji]

I called the person I got it from. She is a Dr. and the person that introduced me to all this, She laughed and said that she should have warned me, The butter can smell a little "gamey". She said it depends on what the grass is like that the cows have been eating. Well, after I set a small tub on the counter over night I noticed it smells a little like cream cheese this morning, but not offensive. I tasted it, and it tasted better than yesterday.
My daughter came to pick hers up and had no problem with it at all.
I don't know if it's cultured. Perhaps that has something to do with the lack blandness I was expecting.
Maybe the Dr. doesn't know. She told me it will last a few weeks.
I'm still cautious but willing to experiment with it.

[RawpaleoHealthdiet]

when raw butter is spoiled its delicious actually if you know its raw and you like the taste. Then guage whether or not your going to eat it off of that. My aged butter tastes like blue-cheese and I HATE blue-cheese. So I don't eat any aged butter. My body isn't craving it...all that aside...

If you can't tell if its spoiled then its probably not.(Only applys to raw butter).

Butter can sit out for days without bacteria growth its nearly pure fat so it keeps a long time.

Ghi(pure butterfat) stores for over a year in a dark cupboard without any bacterial growth.

[livingthelife]

I've found that most of the raw butter I've bought has been poorly made. In order for butter to remain chemically stable either in the refrigerator or (for awhile) at room temperature, ALL the buttermilk has to be removed. Even newly made ultra-fresh butter will smell "gamey" and taste "spoiled" if there is still buttermilk in it. The buttermilk is an agent of the decomposition of the butterfat. I've had poorly made tubs of butter spoil in only days.

Making butter is a matter of churning at the proper temperature for the proper length of time for the requirements of that particular batch of cream. Just because the butter masses up doesn't mean it's done. Unfortunately, natural butter is so rare that many people don't know what it's supposed to taste like. It should have a mild, sweet taste.

I've only found 1 farmer in my area who makes good butter. He also makes cultured butter, which is churned from sour cream. It has a "riper" flavor and is more flaky in texture. Cultured and spoiled are two different things. I personally would not eat spoiled milkfat 

We prefer ghee over butter, but ghee is not raw.

[van]

I gave up on butter when it gave me lumps on knee.  I wear an artificial leg.  I was using grass fed frozen raw butter from a farmer I researched and found in Wisconsin.  It was made at the height of his green grass growing season.  Since having experimented with frozen back fat, and subsequently noticing a sizable drop in energy over eating fresh back fat, I am inclined to think it may have been the frozen element in the butter that allowed something to coagulate into a lump, repeatedly, testing out the frozen butter.  I also since the 70's have developed similar lumps when trying to take oral mineral supplements.   Have you ever seen where they show video from a microscope of single blood cells getting bottlenecked running through a capillary.  MY theory is since I wasn't breast fed,  according to lit., I have more of a porous intestinal lining, allowing for larger particles to enter my system.    I would love to have your source for fresh butter, if grass fed.   I love the taste of it, especially eating it with meat. 

[raw]

I gave up on butter when it gave me lumps on knee.  I wear an artificial leg.  I was using grass fed frozen raw butter from a farmer I researched and found in Wisconsin.  It was made at the height of his green grass growing season.  Since having experimented with frozen back fat, and subsequently noticing a sizable drop in energy over eating fresh back fat, I am inclined to think it may have been the frozen element in the butter that allowed something to coagulate into a lump, repeatedly, testing out the frozen butter.  I also since the 70's have developed similar lumps when trying to take oral mineral supplements.   Have you ever seen where they show video from a microscope of single blood cells getting bottlenecked running through a capillary.  MY theory is since I wasn't breast fed,  according to lit., I have more of a porous intestinal lining, allowing for larger particles to enter my system.    I would love to have your source for fresh butter, if grass fed.   I love the taste of it, especially eating it with meat. 

van, at this point i mainly depend on raw butter (not grass fed) and i know that animal fat will be more superior than that. i am trying to save some money to get organs and other things from the web you recommended. also, rawzi, is a great help for me. thanks to all my friends.

[Michael]

I've found that most of the raw butter I've bought has been poorly made.
We prefer ghee over butter, but ghee is not raw.

Thanks for the info re: buttermilk livingthelife.  This fits in well with my past butter experiences.

Ghee, I guess it could be said, is the dairy equivalent of tallow (rendered suet) in that it's heated and filtered to remove the proteins.  According to William on another thread, all of the proven toxins from cooking (AGEs, Het.amines et al) are protein based and, therefore, would no longer exist in the resultant ghee.  I'm not stating that I agree this to be true but it's an interesting point.   (Please correct me if I'm misquoting you William?!)

I'm interested in the possibility of making 'raw' ghee - also known as butter oil - even though I don't use dairy myself anymore.  I see no reason why the butter could not be melted at low temperature and then separated from the solids with a cheap centrifugal separator leaving a raw butter oil substrate.  Has anyone experiment with this?
My ideal would be to have my own grass-fed pet goats from which I could make large quantities of raw goat butter oil!    

Van, you have goats.  Have you ever tried this before you abandoned butter?

[RawZi]

    I have goat butter.  It's very white colored; because goats make Vitamin A better.  Have you ever separated goat milk from its cream?  You need some special implement, unlike cow.  Has anyone made goat ghee?  I don't know if it's possible.  I too do not plan on making ghee again.  I made that years ago from cow.  Would goat ghee still be golden colored like cow?

[Michael]

Thanks RawZi.  Yes, I've had commercial pasteurised goat butter in the past and had also read that it's distinctive white colour was due to the lack of beta-carotene content.

I've never separated goat cream from milk.  I have done so with large quantities of cow milk in the past using a specialist milk separator which I'd bought.  I was amazed at how much milk it took to, eventually, make a single stick of butter!  What a waste it seemed!  I also had a hand-cranked butter churn as it was my intention to make my own supply of raw butter (this was years before I found a good source).  With so many litres of waste skimmed milk leftover I soon gave up that idea!!   

Did you make raw ghee from cow milk RawZi?  I would expect any ghee made from goat milk would, like the butter, turn out white.  I wonder if it's even worth contemplating the project of producing raw goat butter oil at all and if the goat milk would produce comparable Vitamin A, CLA, Activator X etc as cow butter?

[RawZi]

Thanks RawZi.  Yes, I've had commercial pasteurised goat butter in the past and had also read that it's distinctive white colour was due to the lack of beta-carotene content.

I've never separated goat cream from milk.  I have done so with large quantities of cow milk in the past using a specialist milk separator which I'd bought.  I was amazed at how much milk it took to, eventually, make a single stick of butter! ...

Did you make raw ghee from cow milk RawZi? ...

    You're welcome Michael.  The goat butter I have is raw unpasteurized.  Goat milk  comes out the teat naturally homogenized, quite unlike cow milk, so it's different to separate.  I made ghee from five lbs cow butter at a time.  I've never used a cow milk separator.  Cheese is similar, in that it takes more milk than how much cheese comes out. 

[van]

All my goats are dried up for years now.  Just pets till they pass on.   I bought a cream separator years ago.  It had aluminum parts that for some reason would impart aluminum into the cream.  I didn't use it much after I discovered that.   If I had goats in milk now, I would simply enjoy the cream,  maybe make butter, but I am not sure about the necessity of going so far as to make ghee.   When I had my goats in milk,  I didn't have the experience of having been zc; now for about three years.  My body wasn't very good with fats then.   I would welcome the opportunity of having raw grass fed butter or cream from goats now.    I can say that I am much healthier now on zc focusing on meat and fat than I was when I practically lived on Kefir, my own raw yogurt and milk.  I think it may have been that I almost always used the whey, which is where the lactose is.  Either in the yogurt or Kefir.  The Lactose gets converted into an acid during the culturing process.  That may have been hard on my system, at least from the amounts I was using. I found out after many trials that I did better diluting my kefir with milk, so that it tasted like cream.  ( You can determine how acidic or long you culture yorgurts or kefir.)   It may have been better to have made cheeses, thus diminishing the amount of whey/lactic acid consumed.