Cream separators are on demand these days, because more and more people want to eat healthy food and buy dairy products from local farmers instead of looking at the bottles with white liquid at the supermarket wondering if there’s any natural lactose left in them.
If you’re looking for a milk cream separator for sale you better read this article, because it will help you to choose the one that serves your needs and converts raw milk into bunch of delicious, healthy and fresh dairy products.
What is the Cream Separator and How It Works
Even though raw milk from cows and goats is nutritious and enriched with protein, vitamins, minerals and other components people will always want to turn it into the variety of dairy products. The first step of this interesting transformation process is to extract fat cream from milk, but before we give you more details on how to separate milk from cream at home, we think it would be helpful to start with describing the device you need for it.
Cream separator is a machine that uses centrifugal force for separating cream from whole milk. This device has an interesting mechanism that makes bowl with raw milk to spin at the speed of thousands revolutions per minute. The bowl contains a set of special discs with openings and when whole milk is forced through them the lighter cream gets separated from significantly heavier skim milk.
Modern separators give the ability to make cream with different fatness percentage within minutes and even seconds, which is highly efficient for farmers who want to start a small dairy business or just want to enrich their daily nutrition.
Cream Separator History
Before the invention of a cream separator machine farmers performed separation by using nothing more than laws of nature, physics and chemistry. The process used to separate cream from milk could not be easier, because farmers put fresh milk in a bowl and let it sit until cream separated itself and floated to the top. After that, all they needed to do was just skim it off by hand.
This old way of processing cow and goat milk is good, but it requires plenty of time, space and other resources for getting enough cream while raw milk is famously known for its short expiration time.
For this reason, the invention of Gustaf de Laval, a bright Swedish man, was a huge contribution to the entire dairy industry. He invented and patented in 1894 the very first known centrifugal milk-cream separator. Even though some antique cream separator patents appeared before his, it really doesn’t make much difference for a common farmer who uses a small manual or electric cream separator at home.
Types of Cream Separators
Depending on the variety of characteristics and how much milk needs to be processed and turned into cream and skim milk there are different types of separators, such as:
- Domestic/industrial;
- Open/closed bowl;
- Cold/warm skimming;
- Manual/electrical.
In this article we skip the description of a typical commercial cream separator and concentrate on the types of a commonly used domestic milk separator.
Hand-operated (manual). This type of device is best for use in distant places, because it doesn’t require electricity. The only thing a manual cream separator needs is someone to rotate its handle and put in motion the centrifugal force. Even though many people think that manual type is significantly less efficient, this belief is far from the truth, because a small cream separator is able to process 80-100 liters per hour. Not bad for a hand-operated machine, right?
Electric. This cow or goat milk cream separator has the same capacity – up to 100 liters per hour and doesn’t require manual force to make it work. Just plug it in, pour milk into the bowl, turn on the switch and observe how this machine does all the work for you. The electric cream separator for goat milk or any other milk you have is best to use when you need process large volumes of this nutritious while liquid otherwise you’ll get really tired from rotating the handle on the manual one.
Cold skimming. Dairy industry in many countries including Australia and New Zealand is oriented on cold milk skimming, because it requires lower energy on production. But most important, microorganisms don’t want to grow at cold temperatures.
Warm skimming. Cream separators for small farms do not heat milk by themselves. The process starts with preliminary raw milk heating and only then it gets skimmed. Because of the higher temperature, skimmed milk and separated cream have significant density difference.
