Buttah!

[B Edulis]

Of course there was a buttah thread a while ago. Buttah a perennial topic, each round revealing more nuance. Like love, buttah has endless depth and complexity.

Also, yesterday's NYT food worship section had a bit about butters. I can't find it to link it, however. I think their search engine stinks. And why can't you pick a date and browse?

buttah! buttah! buttah!

[Malawry]

Yeah, I saw the buttah thing in the NYTimes. I felt like they were behind the eGullet curve when I saw it. I didn't know that one of those butters existed (I think it was called Organic Valley of New England or something) and I will look for it at my coop. The coop carries other items in that brand.

In the past week, I have baked twice with Plugra:

1. I made a buttermilky coffee cake last weekend, with a pecan-vanilla swirl. Came out rich and tender, a little too crumbly but delicious nonetheless.

2. Yesterday I baked my first ever pie, a strawberry-rhubarb. I am allergic to strawberries (I baked it for my partner Erin) but I did taste some of the crust and it was quite flaky and rich.

I don't know how much the results would have varied had I used more ordinary butter (Steve Klc, maybe you can speak to this?) but the Plugra definitely held up nicely in baked goods.

BUTTAH!

[Liza]

I've joined this thread now to ask why the Persian market sells Danish butter? Veddy interesting.

I'm with Lurpak, but I cheat with Plugra. And every once in a desperate while, I've been known to have a one-nighter with Land-o-Lakes.

[Rachel Perlow]

2. Yesterday I baked my first ever pie, a strawberry-rhubarb. I am allergic to strawberries (I baked it for my partner Erin) but I did taste some of the crust and it was quite flaky and rich.

Other fruit works well with rhubarb too, like peaches or other types of berries. Next time, make one you both can enjoy together. I think the texture of the inside of a pie can be very sexy and stimulating... (oops I'm thinking of a different thread!)

[Malawry]

I see two problems here:

1. Seasonality, i.e. a lot of those fruits aren't in season at the same time as rhubarb is

2. I'm allergic to way more fruits than just strawberries.  

So, I'm unlikely to sample a rhubarb-other fruit pie anytime soon. And I like tart flavors, but probably not enough to eat an all-rhubarb pie. Snif.

Liza, I'll go your Land-o-Lakes and raise you one generic butter. I've bought it before when doing massive baking projects, when I just couldn't justify the cost of a premium butter. This is usually around the holidays, when there's lots of turnover in the butter dept. (I rationalize that this makes for a fresher product.) It's still better than margarine!

[jaybee]

Yup, I eat both butter and jam on my toast. I don't mix them before applying. I pull the hot bread from the toaster, smear it lightly with good butter, and then slather on the jam (I've mentioned before that I'm a huge jam fan).

I too am a huge butter and jam on toast fan.  But I like the toast to be cool so the butter doesn't melt.  (Melted butter has a whole different taste and mouthfeel).  Then I spread the jam on top.  That Normandy butter (Isigny Ste. Mere) is the best on rye toast.  One of the best black rasberry jams is from Beth's Farms.  It is very dense and rich.  http://www.bethsfarmkitchen.com/

I also love butter spread thickly on matzo then sprinkled with a little salt.  Yum.  One of my favorite sandwiches is buttered rye with a slice of Vidalia onion.  Also try this with chicken fat on rye with the onion.  Whew, this is making me hungry.

buttah up!

[Jinmyo]

Chicken fat. Pork fat. Bacon fat. Duuuuck faaaat.

Not butter, can't be used as omnipresently.

But still good.

[CathyL]

Pork fat on matzah!  Jinmyo, that brings new meaning to the tired term "fusion food."

I recall reading an interview with Maida Heatter: she prefers Land O'Lakes for baking.

[Priscilla]

I've joined this thread now to ask why the Persian market sells Danish butter? Veddy interesting.

I'm with Lurpak, but I cheat with Plugra. And every once in a desperate while, I've been known to have a one-nighter with Land-o-Lakes.

I am no expert, but I do know that, MUCH to its credit, Persian cuisine does not shy away from using plenty of butter--the success of the basic rice dish, chelo, is dependent upon melted butter poured over and making its way down to become a golden-brown buttery ricey crust on the pan bottom, which one strives to remove (and there is a trick, of immersing the pan partly in cool water) all of a piece and serve atop the perfectly-cooked Basmati, everybody at the table getting a little.

So in my experience Persian markets often have a good selection of butter not found in regular supermarkets, as per the lovely Lurpak.  Other imported products, too, olives and capers and cornichons and Italian pastas and sparkling waters and oil, bales of flat-leaf parsley and cilantro for pennies, more more more, also often French-type bread, the best of which in Southern California is baked by Vietnamese bakers and is adamantly Frenchish in nature, the baguettes anyway.

I should add, too, that the Persian women I  have seen shopping at farmer's markets over the years seem not only impeccably dressed, exceedingly polite, uncompromising on veg quality (follow them to the best stuff), but also usually neurosurgeons or similar.

In the interest of full disclosure I will say that behind my butter door is also a stick of Challenge so-called self-styled soi-disant European style, which I tried, OK, and found it to be oily and unpleasant.

And Liza I think now that we've established Lurpak we need to know where you stand on the Beatles.

Priscilla

[Steve Klc]

Here's the NYTimes link a few have mentioned:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/01/dining/01STUF.html

Florence Fabricant's first graph is "Some American butter makers are turning out richer butters, with more butterfat than the federal minimum of 80 percent. This is good news for serious home bakers because more fat means less moisture, making pastry easier to handle and yielding better results. Even in clarifying lower-moisture butter for cooking there is less residue to skim off."

Personally, I've tried to adjust all my baking recipes to Plugra and I think the fact that Trader Joe's sells the 1# blocks for $3.00 is a super deal for the home baker--one which should be talked up more by food writers.  I haven't experienced the staleness others have from this source. We freeze butter, too, all the time in normal household freezers which aren't anywhere near as cold as a commercial freezer.

But as many on this thread have suggested, artisinal "eating" butters can and do surpass Plugra, which I think of as more of a "baking" butter.

[skoolpsyk]

If you buy a stick of unsalted butter, how much salt would you add to make it the equivalent of a salted stick?

[Malawry]

My buttah explorations continue:

A couple months ago I found some Burro Occeli (sp?) at Dean and Deluca's Georgetown/DC store. I bought it and carted it home and immediately smeared some on a slice of baguette. It has a sunnier, almost grassier flavor than my usual Plugra. The subsequent weekend I melted the rest of it and fried some fresh sage leaves in it and used it as a sauce for some homemade spinach-ricotta raviolis. My brunch guest was appropriately impressed. The packaging was really cool too, which it should be for butter so obscenely expensive as this stuff.

Yesterday Edemuth and I visited Fresh Fields and I successfully lobbied her into picking up Lurpak instead of some Plugra for her kitchen. This morning I again successfully lobbied her into bringing her Lurpak up to my kitchen for a tasting. The medium of choice: Pepperidge Farm "Toasting Bread," a decent relatively-blank white bread that crisps nicely in the toaster. We compared my Plugra with Edemuth's Lurpak and the Lurpak wins, hands down. It's got a nice cheesy, cultured/aged flavor to it, yet it's not too strong. Edemuth said she thinks Plugra on toast requires salt, but she thinks Lurpak doesn't (we were tasting unsalted versions of both butters). We raised our toast pieces to Priscilla and Yvonne Johnson for guiding our butter choices.

I still think I'll stick to Plugra since it is so much cheaper than Lurpak and other yuppie butters, but the Lurpak is definitely worth picking up next time I have company over and want to impress.

We also tasted a bunch of jams, but that's a subject for another thread.

[Toby]

I love butter. My earliest memory is the summer I was 2. We were in upstate New York -- my family had an old, non-working farm we vacationed at. It was dairy country -- our road was called Dingle Daisy Road after a cow that used to live there. The local dairy truck came by twice a week with milk in glass bottles with 2 inches of heavy cream on top and butter in blocks. I used to sneak into the refrigerator and steal the butter and run out to the big field in back of the house. I would pull off all my clothes and run around in a circle eating the butter which would drip down my chin from the sun. My mother would catch me, take the butter away, clean me up and get me dressed and a few minutes later I'd be back in the field with my butter.

I recently found out that Krishna, in his guise as a cowboy, was a butter thief. Apparently there's a whole cycle of folk plays that are performed in Indian villages about him stealing butter.

I like Plugra. I've tried Italian butter from the Italian store in Chelsea Market and thought it was delicious also.

[Jinmyo]

Toby, a lovely story.

Re Krisna. Yes, there are very kawaii paintings and such of the blue baby Krisna munching a butterball as big as his head. Folk who are into it are really into it and find it unbearably cute (kawaii).

Gah.

Not the butter, the kawaii.

[Jaymes]

Have often wondered why even just regular restaurant butter in Europe tastes so much bettah than buttah in the States........ even, it seems to me, "gourmet" and European brands that I have purchased here.

Someone who purports to know told me that it is because in Europe the butter is made from unpasturized cream, so that even European brands sold here are not as good because they are pasturized for the U.S. market.

Does anyone know if that is true?

[Wilfrid]

Malawry, is Lurpak considered a fancy "yuppie" butter in the States? It's a pretty standard option on UK supermarket shelves - although the flavor is indeed too strong for a lot of people.

[Priscilla]

My buttah explorations continue:

Lurpak [...[] Lurpak [...] Lurpak [...] Lurpak [...] Lurpak [...] Lurpak [...]

Lovely Lurpak. I am so glad you and Edemuth liked it, Malawry. The strongly cultured flavor is what I like best about it. (At the Persian market where I buy it it's comparable in price to supermarket brands.)

Talking the other day with my Danish neighbor about Danish rye bread, well, the continuing dearth of Danish rye bread (Oraklet provided a recipe over on The Bread Thread), I mentioned Lurpak and she got very wistful and said, "Rye bread and Lurpak are very good friends." It became clear she did not know that Lurpak was available in the U.S., so I gave her a package and told her about the Persian market's carrying it.

She (and her Icelandic husband) were thrilled. He the husband said when they lived in Denmark he ate salted Lurpak (can you imagine the intensity of flavor that must have?), but she the wife likes unsalted, which is the only type I have seen.

The Magic of Butter!

Priscilla

[Malawry]

Fresh Fields sells both salted and unsalted Lurpak butter. I'm a little nervous about the flavor punch the salted version must pack!

Wilfrid, any butter that is as expensive and small-packaged as Lurpak, especially any butter that is sold near the cheeses instead of with the "regular" butters, counts as "yuppie" butter in my book.

Jaymes, I dunno if that's true about buttah, but you use of "bettah" amused me.

[jaybee]

As I've said on other butter threads, the Normandy stuff ("Issigny") is best in my book, but recently I discovered that Land 'O Lakes has introduced an "Ultra Creamy" butter, apparently in response to the growing trend toward "gourmet" butters. I've been using it for about a week on toasted corn muffins, sandwiches of French ham and crusty bread and I like it. The taste isn't as clean and creamy-sweet as the Normandy butter, but it rich, fresh with good flavor and mouthfeel. I'd be interested if anyone tries it, what they think?

Here's a link to beurre d'Isigny Ste. Mere. Da Best Buddah Bar None

[Sandra Levine]

The ultra creamy Land o' Lakes is our standard house butter and has been since it was introduced, for reasons of availability, cost, taste and texture. I wish it were available by the pound rather than the half-pound. Food Emporium carries it. I began using it as a substitute for Plugra, which is harder for me to find regularly, but my husband prefers it. We also like Isigny, especially when we feel like a taste of France. Plugra and the ultra creamy behanve similarly for cooking. I'm tempted to do a side-by-side tasting of the premium butters. Anyone interested? We could taste them plain, spread on bread and as used in a simple cookie and simple savory preparation. That way we could choose our favorites for spreading, baking and cooking.

[cakewalk]

The Occelli butter from Italy is so good because the cream comes from freely ranging cows grazing on the natural flora of the Piedmont region.  ... It all starts and ends with the quality of the cream.

This site never ceases to amaze me. I've been reading it for a short while, and I can't begin to tell you how much I've learned. About everything. This is serious voyeurism on my part (and I love it!). I grew up on Breakstone's Sweet Whipped Butter. I can just about feel everyone cringing as they read that sentence. I still love it, but I know that when I shut down this computer I'll get myself over to Fairway and probably buy at least three or four different types of butter and say a serious farewell to my diet. Thanks all!

Anyway, about the quote above. It reminded me of a beautiful passage in Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbevilles" that I hadn't thought of in ages. Bear with me.

Tess is working on a dairy farm (where she meets her Angel Clare) and one of the things they do there is make butter, which is sold to rich folk in London. The owner of the farm receives a letter from one of his customers, complaining of a "twang" in the butter. The owner takes a taste and says, indeed, there is a twang. 'Tis garlic! There must be some garlic growing in the fields where the cows graze, thereby affecting the sweetness of the cream and, of course, the butter. And there is a lovely scene in which every person on the farm lines up in a row, and they walk slowly across the fields seeking out the offending weed (which they find, and pull). All for the rich gentleman in London!

I remember how amazed I was at this passage the first time I read that book, not least because it had never occurred to me before (I'm a city girl) that such a thing could make a difference in how the butter would taste!

[Jinmyo]

I would love to have butter from cows grazing on garlic, chives, wheatgrass, and clover...

[helenas]

The Occelli butter from Italy is so good because the cream comes from freely ranging cows grazing on the natural flora of the Piedmont region.  

Esperya and Gugino seem to agree with you. Prompted by esperya's newsletter i went to WS site to search for Gugino on butter. Here the result of his tasting of 13 artisanal butters (link).

[jaybee]

At AHR's suggestion, i bought some Vermont Cultured Butter recently. It comes in a chub, like a sausage, wrapped in paper. It is very very good. The first "local" butter that rivals the Normandy Beurre D'Issigny that I love. I will bring these to the vertical tasting,

along with Plugras, Celles, Land O Lakes Creamy and ???

[helenas]

along with Plugras, Celles, Land O Lakes Creamy and ???

Vologodskoe butter?

(just being patriotic)