Butter is a staple in households and cuisines throughout the world. From savory dishes like garlic butter chicken to sweet desserts like butter cake to the simple pat of butter that you spread on your morning bagel, butter can elevate even the most basic of dishes.

What is Butter?

Butter is a fat made from churning or mixing cream until it separates into a solid and a thin liquid. The solid is called butterfat and the liquid is called buttermilk. Believe it or not, a third of the world’s milk production is devoted to making butter with one of the top producing countries being the United States.

Butter’s Origins

Butter’s origins go back as far as the domestication of animals and would have originally been made from sheep or goat milk. It is thought that the first butter making could have been an accident, with cream in an animal skin being shaken on a bumpy journey and turned to butter. Nevertheless, a tablet from 2,500 BCE depicts a cow being milked and butter being made, so we know that by this time, butter was a staple in many civilizations.

The Industrialization of Butter

Until the 19th century, butter was primarily made by shaking or churning cream in small batches on farms and in homes. The invention of the cream separator changed the process and made way for butter to be mass-produced the way it is today. The cream separator sped up the painstakingly slow process of allowing the cream to naturally separate which exponentially sped up the process of butter making. By the early 1900s, more than half of the butter made in the United States was produced in a factory.

While some people still make small batches of butter by hand, here at Schier Company we provide all of the equipment you need to start turning your cream into butter on a large scale! Contact us at 918-321-3151 for more information about our services and products.