Making croissants with Canadian butter

[plunk]

It seems that in Canada, we cannot import the high fat percentage European butters due to the dairy laws. How does using the lower percentage Canadian butters affect the end result of croissants (and puff pastry) when making them at home and how would one adjust or compensate the recipe or method?

[James MacGuire]

Yes, there has been much talk about the fat content of Canadian butters, including an article by Toronto's Gina Mallet. I have had great results with a Lactantia butter ( owned by Parmalat) called Lactantia Plus. They began setting aside batches of butter with higher butterfat contents ( with less water in them, in other words) after a meeting with local members of France's Academie Culinaire some years ago and calling it Plus.

Cultured butters have a delicious nutty flavor, and apart from Lactantia, I have seen cultured butters at Loblaw's which, I seem to remember, are calles Normandy style or something similar. It has been a while since I have worked with anything besides Lactantia Plus, but it seems to me that as long as the butter has been "plastified" ( that is, kneaded or beaten with a rolling pin until smooth but kept cold- this is easily done in two or three minutes) and things are not allowed to warm up too much during the tuning process ( the rolling and folding lamination process) there should be little problem.

I had some very good results when I last worked in Vermont with what was called a "European Style" butter which touted 83% butterfat, and have heard about a similar butter called plusgras ( the name seems to be an effort to reproduce every French sound that Americans have problems pronouncing...) but these butters are not cultured ( cultured means that the cream goes through a fermentation process- a "maturation"- similar to that of creme fraiche which is no longer necessary technically with modern methods of making butter) and wish they were.

[trillium]

There is a pretty tasty cultured butter widely available here in the US made by Organic Valley (the trade name) . I use the unsalted version in all of my baking, but the trouble is finding a place where it's suitably fresh. They list it at 18% fat and the ingredients as: Pasteurized organic sweet cream, microbial enzymes, cultures. They also market a more expensive type as "European Style" cultured butter. Same fat percentage. The ingredients: Organic pasteurized sweet cream and Swiss cultures.

regards,

trillium