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anhydrous butter


prairiegirl

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Actually, I thought that anhydrous butter (AB) was more than just ghee, though ghee is a step on the way to AB. I think they concentrate it more and more with vacuum drying, etc.

John DePaula
formerly of DePaula Confections
Hand-crafted artisanal chocolates & gourmet confections - …Because Pleasure Matters…
--------------------
When asked “What are the secrets of good cooking? Escoffier replied, “There are three: butter, butter and butter.”

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A google search turns up this butter glossary. Their definition is

Anhydrous butterfat. Made by gently heating butter to break the emulsion, followed by centrifugation to remove the milk serum from the fat fraction. Butterfat content of the remaining butter oil is over 99 percent.

I imagine ghee has a bit more water content than that, unless of course it's been made with centrifugal force...

nunc est bibendum...

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Is it being used for bon bons or puff paste or something?

In France "dry" butter is used for chocolates as well as pastry such as brioche, etc.

It's kind of (from what I understand) a step up frpm Plugra.

A ghee like product would seem a bit greasy maybe?

2317/5000

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As far as recipes go, a carefully prepared clarified butter should be a close enough approximation to the real deal. This butter can be used in bonbons, puff pastry and other laminated products and is good in that you can better control the amount of water in your products that way. You usually can't substitute a standard 82% fat butter into a anhydrous butter recipe and vice versa.

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A google search turns up this butter glossary. Their definition is
Anhydrous butterfat. Made by gently heating butter to break the emulsion, followed by centrifugation to remove the milk serum from the fat fraction. Butterfat content of the remaining butter oil is over 99 percent.

I imagine ghee has a bit more water content than that, unless of course it's been made with centrifugal force...

Commercially, it probably would be.

Using a continuous centrifuge, similar to those used for milk/cream separation.

Here's a quote from a traditionalist craft ghee producer

Commercial Ghee

In the EU it is legal to use the term ghee as a synonym for butter oil - that is cream or butter from which moisture and non-fat solids (proteins and lactose) have been removed.  BUT in the commercial ghee generally available tracers are added and the moisture and non-fat solids are removed by centrifuge and not by gentle heating. (Some, perhaps purist, ghee experts say one should not even stir the ghee when it is being made let alone centrifuge it violently).

http://www.maharishi.co.uk/products/WhatIs...AndWhyUseIt.htm

Added: the "tracers" are for the purpose of subsidy tracking (and seemingly added to butter-derived products claiming the relevant financial treatment) ... :huh: anyway, you'd have that (in the EU) in something sold as "anydrous" too ...

Edited by dougal (log)

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch ... you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan

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i can't say that i've tried but i have a hard time imagining that a home or even bakery produced clarified butter would be an "acceptable" substitute for dry butter, as is commonly used in laminates in France

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Does anyone know of a U.S. (or N. American) source for anhydrous butter?

John DePaula
formerly of DePaula Confections
Hand-crafted artisanal chocolates & gourmet confections - …Because Pleasure Matters…
--------------------
When asked “What are the secrets of good cooking? Escoffier replied, “There are three: butter, butter and butter.”

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ghee is 99% butterfat, i doubt that it gets much "dryer" than that, dry butter is used in recipes to avoid a higher water activity, emusionwise a real (82%) butter is better, if used right it makes a more stable emulsion.

cheers

t.

toertchen toertchen

patissier chocolatier cafe

cologne, germany

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This is a quote from an interview with a pastry chef by the name of Kelly Miura I did for Pastrypros.com

"Unusual ingredients - I guess the most unique one to me was “beurre

sec,” a semi-dehydrated butter. It was waxy and very yellow. Not a

widely distributed product; I think they may have said his dairy may

make it exclusively for him. We used it in the pate feuilletee."

I'll write her and see what they used in the chocolates.

2317/5000

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Artisanbaker--don't you need the water in the buttter to turn to steam to provide the lift in laminated doughs? Do the French who use beurre sec do something additional to get the lift between layers? Or am I overestimating the importance of the water in butter?

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Artisanbaker--don't you need the water in the buttter to turn to steam to provide the lift in laminated doughs?  Do the French who use beurre sec do something additional to get the lift between layers?  Or am I overestimating the importance of the water in butter?

This is why in pastry school when making puff pastry our French instructor would have us "step down" from plugra-style 82% butter, used in everything else we produced, to using normal 78-80% butter, and had us make side-by-side comparisons once. It seems like it would only make a small difference but it works (11-22 percent more water to lift the dough). I think the ideal balance we found was 82% for detrempe (where the butter serves more for dough feel and taste) and 78-80% for the beurrage.

He argued that while higher butterfat was better for many uses, in puff pastry American butter is superior. He explained that this was the "secret weapon" for several cycles of the U.S. team in the bread baking World Cup, once they realized this and used different percentages butter across the line of products they made for the competition. The European teams' butters ranged from 82% to dry for different uses, but the "non-professional" ordinary U.S. butter rounded out the lower end of our range.

Brian Ibbotson

Pastry Sous for Production and Menu Research & Development

Sous Chef for Food Safety and Quality Assurance

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here is a response from an email I sent to Ramon Morato:

Dear Debra,

Anhydrous butter is not the same as clarified butter.

Anhydrous butter is an industrial product that has had the moisture content reduced to 0,5%. If you can't not get anhidrous butter you can use clarified butter as it is the nearest in terms of moisture percentage.

Your only problem is you never know what the real percentage of moisture is in clarified butter.

Kind regards

Montse Ribé

Personal Assistant to Ramon Morató

info@ramonmorato.com

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Pretty swell that Morato got back to you.

BTW, is the book mainly on bon bons?

Also, is it in English as well as Spanish?

The book is very heavy with about 600 pages.!! It covers all kinds of pastry and confectionary recipes. So, in my shop the pastry chef can use it, and for me, it has lots of bonbon ideas. On each page, 1/2 page is in Spanish, and the other column has different coloured ink and is in English. Whenever I run into difficulties and I have exhausted all my options...I go to the horses mouth!! So I will email the author for clarification. And always, I have received a response.

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Does anydrous butter contain milk solids? That would be a big difference. In clarified butter the solids (and therefore much of the flavor) are removed; in ghee the solids are browned (adding toasted flavors) and then removed.

If you remove the water but leave the solids alone you'd have a different product.

Notes from the underbelly

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Artisanbaker--don't you need the water in the buttter to turn to steam to provide the lift in laminated doughs?  Do the French who use beurre sec do something additional to get the lift between layers?  Or am I overestimating the importance of the water in butter?

Can't vouch for the above reply to your question (while it certainly sounds good on paper) but don't forget that for every pound of flour there is a half pound of water... ;)

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