It’s tough to imagine starting your day without buttered toast, and it’s hard to resist a cheesy pizza from your favorite restaurant. Both butter and cheese are milk products that bring the goodness of nature to your health and taste. However, they are quite different from each other. You may find both equally tasty, but do you know the differences between these two dairy products? Let’s find out.
Butter is made from the cream that floats on top of milk. It is a mixture of milk fat, buttermilk, and water. After removing the cream from milk, it gets soured with strains of lactic acid and bacteria called Streptococcus cremoris or Lactobacillus lactis. Another bacteria, Leuconostoc citrovorum, is added to the cream before churning, which converts citric acid present in milk into acetyl, responsible for butter’s flavor and aroma. During churning, the cream becomes granular, and buttermilk separation occurs. The milk fat globules get violently agitated and clump together, turning the cream’s nature from oil-in-water emulsion to water-in-oil emulsion.
Butter has a unique characteristic known as spreadability, not present in substitutes used in place of butter. This spreadability results from glyceride structures of butterfat and the presence of saturated fatty acids. Once well pasteurized, butter can be refrigerated for a long time without any deterioration in its quality.
Cheese is made from milk curd separated from the liquid portion of milk. The milk curd is obtained using an enzyme called rennin and lactic bacterial starter cultures. The curd gets cut into cubes and heated to about 38 degrees Celsius for about 45 minutes. The curd cubes shrink due to heat and increased acid formation. The remaining liquid portion of milk, called whey, gets drained, and the curd is cut into small cubes again. These cubes are kept under pressure overnight to drain off more moisture. Though there is still moisture present in the final product, its proportion determines whether the cheese is classified as hard, semi-soft, or soft cheese. Soft cheese has a water content of 50-80%, semi-hard cheese has a moisture content of around 45%, and hard cheese has a water content below 40%.
If additional bacterial action is required to give cheese its desired shape and texture, it is called ripened cheese. In India, a special cheese called Surti paneer is made in Mumbai and Surat, using coagulants obtained from the stomach of a goat. Ordinary cheese is made from coagulant obtained from buffalo.
Key Takeaways
- Butter is made from milk cream and is a mixture of milk fat, buttermilk, and water, while cheese is made from milk curd separated from the liquid portion of milk.
- Butter has a unique characteristic called spreadability, which is not present in substitutes, while cheese can be classified as hard, semi-soft, or soft based on its moisture content.
- Butter is higher in calories and fat content than cheese, while cheese is generally higher in protein content.
