THE PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF MILK FATS OF DIFFERENT CHEMICAL COMPOSITIONS

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Abstract
A series of milk fats of different fatty acid composition has been obtained by supplementing the diet of the dairy cow with tallow, a mixture of palm oil/palmitic acid or soya oil. The melting behaviour of the milk fats has been studied using the differential scanning calorimeter. Dietary soya oil yielded a butterfat which was fairly soft (50 per cent of the crystalline material melting at 8oC), whilst palm oil/palmitic acid gave a relatively hard butterfat (50 per cent of the crystalline material melting at 18‐3oC), with the product derived from feeding tallow intermediate between these extremes, but closer in its behaviour to the butterfat obtained by feeding palm oil/palmitic acid. In order to eliminate the effect on the melting behaviour of milk fat triglycerides having non‐random structures, thermograms were also obtained for samples of the experimental butterfats after they had been inter‐esterified. The results suggest that, for the milk fats having the compositions used in this work, melting behaviour is dominated by the proportion of palmitic acid present.

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