La Guerre du Buerre

[alacarte]

The range of butters and butter substitutes is staggering: butter, organic butter, margarines with or without dairy, yogurt-based "spreads," and more recently, new lines using olive oil as the primary ingredient (including one from former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca).

So I ask you, which butter is best? Does is really matter? And what about fancy French & English butters vs. American butters?

Does the wrong kind of butter ruin a recipe?

[Stone]

Gary Danko Restaurant in SF uses Challenge butter. Comparing that with the homemade organic butter at French Laundry and whatever was served at Fifth Floor, I'd say that Challenge won. It was fresh, and wonderfully creamy. Challenge makes a few "types", I'm not sure which this was. I thought French Laundry's organic butter tasted oily.

[alacarte]

I remember a Ruth Reichl article, in which she recommended that diners sample the butter (a capella, no bread) before even picking up a menu. If the butter tastes like the refrigerator, she counselled, you should run.

[Sandra Levine]

An earlier thread on butter

and another

Edited May 2, 2003 by Sandra Levine (log)

[nightscotsman]

And one more that has some good info: Keller's/Plugra and other butters

The short of it is - yes, which butter you use makes a difference, especially when used in baking (butterfat content), and eaten more or less straight on bread and such. If I only have access to supermarket brands, I use Challenge. However, my preference for baking is Plugra if it is readily available and not too expensive.

[alacarte]

An earlier thread on butter

and another

Thank you Sandra.

[jackal10]

Yes, the wrong butter can ruin a recipe.

Many of the butter substitutes use thickeners and emulsifiers. These don't behave the same way as butter under heat, or even under shear like being stirred into a mixture. They melt at different temperatures.

The taste of the butter (or other fat) is often reflected in the final taste. If you use crap butter it tastes crap. If you want your dish to taste of EVOO use EVOO.

Besides salted and unsalted (why use salted? Its much easier to control the salt in a recipe using unsalted) the major difference is in the lactic acid content. Some european "cultured" butters are allowed to ferment to develop flavour, as opposed to sweet butter.

There are other variants such as whipped butter, and of course Ghee and other clarified butter products.

[Really Nice!]

The best butter I've ever tasted is Isgny Saint Mere. It's available at whole foods for about $4.50 per 8 ounces. It's imported from Normandy France.

It has a very intense butter flavor. A little goes a long way.

[Katherine]

Whenever I have guests for dinner, I make my own, from locally bottled cream. It blows them all away.

I tried culturing it first, but it tasted the same.

[docsconz]

I love butter, but most of the time when I go out to eat and have bread and butter, the butter is good, but not particularly memorable. This was not the case with a recent lunch at the restaurant Rosalie in Montreal. The butter was from Quebec and absolutely sensational. it didn't hurt that the bread was damn good too. I have to remember to get the source for that butter the next time I go there.

[rickster]

The best source for Plugra, at least in the Northeast, is Trader Joe's which sells it at $2.99 for a 1 pound block.

[Louisa Chu]

Is dry butter available in the States?

My favourite eating butter - the lightly salted artisanal beaten butter, La Beurre Bordier.

[Really Nice!]

Whenever I have guests for dinner, I make my own, from locally bottled cream. It blows them all away.

Katherine, how do you make yours?

I buy 8 oz of heavy cream and add 1 teaspoon of sea salt to it and let it sit overnight. The next day I pour the heavy cream into the kitchenaid mixer and mix it for about 15 minutes until the curds and whey separate. The curds eventually make a big ball. I get about 2.5 ounces of 'buttah' to every 8 ounces of cream.

Thanks for any insight you can provide.

Mike

[Katherine]

I open up a 16 ounce bottle of heavy cream, purchased from a local dairy (not ultrapasteurized and no additives - I'm lucky to have that). I dump it into the KitchenAid, turn it on and wait til the buttermilk starts splashing onto the counter, about 10 minutes. I form the butter into a lump and knead it in a bowl of cold water to wash out the milk, then add salt to taste (ground to a powder in a mortar and pestle).

[docsconz]

Can you use a cuisinart instead of the Kitchenaid? I imagine one can, but what would be the best way of doing it - the metal blade or the dough blade?

[Katherine]

I'd guess that a food processor would heat up the cream too much to make butter, but if you want to try it, let us know how it works out.

[alacarte]

Is dry butter available in the States?

My favourite eating butter - the lightly salted artisanal beaten butter, La Beurre Bordier.

Loufood, what is "dry butter"? That's a new one to me, and it sounds intriguing.

Apologies if this was covered in one of the other threads.

[Jon Tseng]

I open up a 16 ounce bottle of heavy cream, purchased from a local dairy (not ultrapasteurized and no additives - I'm lucky to have that). I dump it into the KitchenAid, turn it on and wait til the buttermilk starts splashing onto the counter, about 10 minutes. I form the butter into a lump and knead it in a bowl of cold water to wash out the milk, then add salt to taste (ground to a powder in a mortar and pestle).

I do something fairly similar, but use my ice-cream machine for half an hour (not chilled, of course!)

It tastes wonderfully creamy, but the texture is a little brittle rather than smooth. I believe this is down to the temperature conditions during the churning process, but am not au fait on specifics

Unsalted butter rules! Beurre d'Echire (thinks its an isigny butter) is used in a number of excellent restaurants here in London. They also stock a wonderfully creamy bavarian unsalted butter in sainsburys supermarkets

(I think I've said this all before, so apologies for those experiencing groundhog day.)

cheerio

J

[Louisa Chu]

Apologies if this was covered in one of the other threads.

Dry butter is butter with a low water content that's used in baking typically for puff pastry, etc.

And my apologies if it's been covered in another thread!

[alacarte]

Thanks loufood -- I appreciate the explanation!

[rickster]

As an amateur baker, I haven't heard the term dry butter in the US, but I do know that some butters like Plugra are marketed as having a higher butterfat content/less water than regular supermaket brands and are better suited for baking appliactions.

[butterchik]

This was not the case with a recent lunch at the restaurant Rosalie in Montreal. The butter was from Quebec and absolutely sensational. it didn't hurt that the bread was damn good too. I have to remember to get the source for that butter the next time I go there.

Check out L'Ancetre organic butter - the finest canadian butter (Keb of course) I've tried by far. It is available at most grocery stores on Vancouver Island and second only to Lescure for me.

Does anyone know if Plugra is available in Canada?

As a school project in the second grade we made mini butter churns out of litre mason jars with a hole drilled in the lid and "paddles" made of tubing and trimmed plastic yogurt lids.

Maybe thats where my addiction started...

[skyflyer3]

I was poking around the brie section at Whole Foods in Seattle, and found they started carrying bulk "Spreadable French Butter". Just a couple of scoops of butter in those clear plastic tubs, $15.99/lb. I asked them what brand it was, and they pulled out this wooden basket with unreadable print on it. Within the basket, wrapped in brown paper, was this huge hunk of creamery goodness. It smelled incredible. They offered me a taste of it, and it was very salty but very creamy and I had to have it. It's really good plain on any kind of bread imaginable, and if I feel truly decadent I drizzle on a little Huguel Acacia Honey *swoon*.

After doing a little research on the web, I think the butter might be Echire. Whole Foods also started carrying Italian butter in wax paper, the name I've forgotten. All this talk of butter is making me regret not snatching it up when I was there a few days ago, even if it was $9 a log. I'm this close to calling colleagues in Minneapolis to send me some of that Hope Creamery butter - or making my own from Strauss Cream. And I don't even eat that much butter.

[laurel]

I make butter from cream cultured with "Piima" culture. Making the butter takes about 10-20 minutes of stirring with a wooden spoon. I think the culture does something to it to make it turn into butter much faster. Making the next batch of cultured cream si even easier, I just leave a few tablespoons in the jar, add fresh cream, and leave it out in the covered jar until it's sour enough (a few days depending on the temparature), then put it in the fridge.

[bleachboy]

I used to use Plugra a lot, especially in my pie crusts. However, the ubiquitous (in my parts, anyway) "Organic Valley" brand now has their own butter, which looks to contain 2% more butterfat and is equally tasty and a bit cheaper, so I'm using that brand now.