Aged Butter part 2: the science of rancidity
by Johnny Drain This series is about oxidation, rancidity, and aging butter. In Part 1 I gave some background about butter, rancidity and the cultural context for eating aged butter. In this second part, I’ll explore the science of oxidation in fats and the safety of eating them. I’ll then describe the results of my work on culturing butters with unusual sources of bacteria in Part 3 and on aging butters in Part 4. In Part 1 of this series, we examined how rancidity, culturally speaking, is rather poorly defined: foodstuffs can be seen as rancid depending on historical precedent and context, even though they may involve similar or identical chemical processes in foodstuffs we regard as delicious. From a scientific perspective, rancidity can be defined a little more strictly, though we will see that discussing the science of rancidity, oxidation, and their relationship to each other can still become … Read more