Butter and Vegetable Fat Spreads

Butter is pervasive, both as an ingredient and as a condiment. At this session, co-hosted by The SOAS Food Studies Centre, accredited butter grader and dairy technologist Jayne Hickinbotham will lead a tutored tasting of yellow fat spreads running the gamut from vegetable-oil based spreads to farmhouse whey butter. Along the way she’ll cover the properties of milk fat, the history of butter and its imitators, the properties of saturated fats and hydrogenated and trans-fatty acids, and the microbial stability of butter. She’ll also debunk some common urban myths surrounding this most familiar of foods.

About the Speaker:

Jayne Hickinbotham joined Dairy Crest Foods in 1980 as a graduate of Bristol University, and held a number of production, technical and grading posts in small, traditional and large, industrial-scale dairies, finally achieving the status of company cheese and butter grader. Since 1990, Jayne has been self-employed, as Dee Dairy Services, providing technical advice on diverse aspects of food safety and quality; she specialises in dairy technology training, developing and implementing HACCP systems and auditing food producers throughout Europe against the supplier approval criteria of UK retailers. Jayne is a trading dispute arbitrator and an accredited butter grader and verification officer with the RPA. Jayne co-authored the SALSA plus SCA module and organises the Dairy Products Section of the Great Yorkshire Show; she is currently building a display model dairy.