With enough butter, anything is good.

Julia Child’s comment (repeated by Ina Garden on her TV show) is a belief held by many traditional Chefs. Business Insider did a survey among Chefs to find favorite butters and I have incorporated their summary into this post. Of course, I had to also go out and buy some of these butters to test them out (what a hardship!!).

Before I continue with my planned post, given electricity has been cut by PG&E (for the first time as a precaution), please see a previous post on prepping your fridge and freezer for this situation. No Electricity, Now What?

First, what is butter?

Made from churned cow’s milk or cream, butter is 80% fat, 16-18% water, and the remaining amount is “milk solids” (things not fat or water). This type of butter melts at 98.6F, starts to brown at ~250F, and starts to smoke at ~302F.

• As a young kid, I once made butter from cream in Germany, which took a lot of arm power to churn. The result was a large clump of yellow, slightly tangy stuff in the bucket.
• In turn, my effort was served that night for dinner. The butter was clumped on a plate, next to another plate with a pile of salt, and finally a bowl of fresh steaming new potatoes. We took a fork and stabbed a potato, dipped it into the butter, then lightly touched the salt and ate it. Potatoes had never tasted so good after a hard day of working!

Butter is usually made from cow’s milk, but can also use milk from sheep,  goats,  buffalo, and yaks. 

What does butter do?

Butter provides tenderness, flakiness, unique taste, leavening, and structure to baked foods. In general use, butter contributes to flavor, mouthfeel, texture, and in some cases even shelf life. It also helps, I think, to distribute ingredients a bit more uniformly. Since we know butter is made up of fat, water, and milk solids, here is how each can impact our cooking.

Overall

Many Chefs add a bit of cold butter at the very end of making a sauce, because the butter adds a creaminess, and glossy shine to the sauce along with a butter taste. The flavor of butter cannot be replicated well, other “butter-flavored” items taste a bit chemically to me. In America butter must be pasteurized. The label “sweet cream butter” indicates the butter was made with pasteurized cream.

Water

Butter plays an important role in leavening many baked goods. For pies and biscuits use cold butter.

• Butter has 16-18% water so when used for baking, say a pie, it steams and the result are flakey pie crusts.
• For biscuits we usually use cold butter because it then forms larger steam bubbles and the larger flakes this makes works well in biscuits.
• For making cakes, this same water interacts and strengthens gluten in flour, resulting in a batter with some substance that can support layers or withstand my heavy-handed application of icing.

Fat

For loafs and cookies I cream butter with sugar at ~room temp. This collection of fat, sugar and air results in fluffy and tender baked food.

• The 80% fat does well for cookies and actually inhibits gluten enough, that cookies are are not dough-chewy but tender and allows the cookie dough to spread in the oven.
• Likewise, when making a Roux (the first step in making a Béchamel sauce), fat from the melted butter coats the flour which means when you add milk (or other liquid) the paste will not produce lumpy sauce.

Solids

Even the milk solids have a role in that those solids contain sugars that can caramelize in the oven, leading to golden biscuit top and bottoms.

Butter Choices

These are the Business Insider’s Chefs choices for the best butters to cook with, and an overview of their comments mixed in with mine. I have added links to each company so you can see what their corporate culture is like.:

• Beurre D’Isigny from Normandy, France is a very good tasting butter. (The beurre de baratte is a slow churned version, and creamy with a good mouthfeel.) Made from grass fed cows. It has a longer shelf life due to some minerals it contains.
• California’s Challenge Dairy Butter takes an artisanal  approach by using milk from family-run, grass-only farms.
• Kerrygold Irish Butter from Ireland is readily available (even at Costco) and tastes creamy with a rich (82% butterfat) buttermilk flavor. It is also very yellow compared to regular American butter due to the beta carotene-rich grass that Ireland’s cows graze on.
• Land O’Lakes unsalted: A good general all-purpose butter. Great for general baking needs. American butters usually contain 80% butterfat.
• Meyenberg Goat Milk butter
• Plugra European-Style butter has a higher fat percentage than other butter so some say it stays spreadable even when cold.
• Trader Joe’s Cultured Salted Butter has active bacteria for a nice tang, this is a French butter from Brittany.
• Vermont Creamery butter

Is Butter Bad?

Quick answer: NO….but.

Butter contains just a small bit of lactose, so many lactose-intolerant people are able to consume it without problems. If you have a milk-allergy you may need to avoid butter.

The idea is to use the milk products from natural, grass grazing cows. HealthLine: Grass-fed butter is a good source of vitamin A and the antioxidant beta carotene. It also has a higher proportion of healthy, unsaturated fats and CLA than regular butter.

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition: Long-term exposure to circulating phospholipid pentadecanoic, heptadecanoic, or trans-palmitoleic acids was not significantly associated with total mortality or incident CVD among older adults. In essence, their findings support and strengthen the growing evidence that indicates moderate dairy fat use (including butter) does not increase risk of heart disease or overall mortality in older adults. 

Findings from recent studies:

• Butter is rich in fat-soluble vitamins (A, E, K, D)
• Contains healthy saturated fats
• Lowers heart attack risks
• A good source of 4-carbon fatty acid Butyrate (anti-inflammatory)
• Rich in Conjugated Linoleic Acid
• High-fat dairy does not increase risk of metabolic disease 

Butter Variations

Butter comes salted or unsalted, cultured or uncultured, whipped or sticked, European or American, and regular or premium.

• The Chefs I have worked with generally only use unsalted butter, indicating they want to know how much salt they add to their dishes and not have others season their food. Reality is that the amount of salt varies with each brand although I have read it averages ~1/4t to 1/3t salt per stick. Everything I have read indicates that salt was added to butter to help it last longer, not for any taste reason. (If you are leaving butter out of the fridge, use salted butter as salt is a preservative and it might help.)
• Fermenting the cream before churning is cultured butter. This process changes the taste of the butter, some of the change people call tangy. The only time I have eaten cultured butter is when it is on bread or potatoes, but not in something I cooked with.
• Whipped butter is just regular butter that has had air whipped into it, so it has greater volume and spreads easier. I have never used this in cooking but know people who have this in their house for use on toast. Generally this whipped butter comes in a plastic lidded container.
• European butter is generally creamer to me when I taste it, but of course it can have upwards of 86% fat while American butter tends to be in the lower 80% range. In cooking, the difference may be hard to tell, but if it is on toast or used in butter heavy recipes you can taste the difference.
• When cooking I cannot really tell the difference between the regular and premium butters so do not really bother with this difference.

Storage

When I buy butter at Costco, I tend to place most of it in the freezer downstairs. When I open one pack, I move it to the fridge door that has the cover on it so it is isolated from any fridge smells. My preference is to keep butter in the fridge, while others in my household prefer to keep butter out, covered in a butter dish. I know butter can go rancid and worry about that, but their focus is on having it easy to spread. (Perhaps I should get them a tub of whipped butter?)

Compound Butter

This is a technique of adding herbs or spices to butter to make a “flavored infused compound.” Like garlic-butter that is often served on steak.

Clarified Butter

This is butter that has had milk solids and water removed; if you think about this you will notice that means clarified butter = butterfat. With something pure fat, the smoke point is higher (400F range). So far, I have not posted any recipe call for clarified butter, so am not sure what to use it in. Certainly, it does not sound like it would be good on toast, or good for baking. I have read that people with milk intolerance can consume this type of butter without harm. But the real question is, if it has no milk parts, can vegans use clarified butter?

To make clarified butter, heat is used to break the emulsified butter down into its parts. While heating the butter, the foam is the milk parts which can be spooned away, the butter fat will solidify as it cools and can be put into a bowl. The last milky layer, usually at the bottom of the pan, can be disposed.

Ghee is a form of clarified butter that has continued to simmer until all moisture is evaporated and the milk solids brown. Then it is strained to remove all remaining solids. There is no need to refrigerate.

Browned Butter

To brown butter, place butter in a light colored interior sauce pan. (The light color is important for you want to watch the color of the butter as it turns brown, as you do not want it black, which can happen rather quickly.) Turn on medium heat to simmer, and stir occasionally so it browns evenly. It will start to bubble, froth, and foam; turning colors within ~5-10min. Just before it reaches the color you want, remove from heat and if not used immediately pour into a waiting bowl to cool.

This will have a nutty aroma and will be golden brown in color. What I have used this for is to add sage leaves to the hot butter and then pour some of it into a squash or sweet potato (or a combo of both) soup. When you add water filled sage it will “explode” so hold it away from you and do this off heat.

The Politics of “Butter”

Think about the terms MILK, MEAT, CHEESE and BUTTER. Now consider Nut + Oat Milks, Impossible Meats, Vegan Cheese, and Vegan Butter. The Beef and Dairy industries and their lobbyists have seen the production and sale numbers soar for these alternatives, and are worried.

Powerful Beef and Dairy lobbyists are seeking to block the attempts of alternative companies from using these terms for items not make by cows. Their main argument is that people are using those terms generically, and as a result are “stealing” from the “real” producers of beef, milk, cheese, and butter. And they are correct, not in the “stealing,” but that that milk products have experienced a multi-decades long decline that has resulted in farmers leaving the Dairy business or going bankrupt.

One Story:

A Japanese immigrant, Miyoko Schinner, started Miyoko’s Kitchen in 2014. She is now based in Petaluma California, and is a producer of alternative dairy products. (1)  From a small e-commerce site, to now serving her products through 12k stores, she is a business success story. She (and others) is so successful in fact, it caught the eye of those lobbyists.

• For stats on this I look to LA Times: plant-based milk retail sales totaled $1.8 billion for the year ending May 25, a 6.5% increase, according to data from Nielsen.
• Cheese substitute sales totaled $117 million, showing 17.4% growth.
• Cashew butters were up to $12.6 million, representing an uptick of 4.9%

In Wisconsin, Miyoko’s Kitchen vegan cheese products were removed from shelves, including from the Whole Foods. The reason was that politicians do not want their constituents to suffer financial harm, so are pressing bills and the FDA, to make “milk” defined as something from “hooved animals.” There is pressure to create a strict system of nationwide enforcement of product labeling, and the curtailment use of certain terms. For instance, for Vegan Butter, instead of using “butter” they want the manufacturers to use “vegetable spread.”

Now this is not new, when margarine came out some states (Wisconsin) banned it from store shelves, now they are trying to ban non-dairy butter. This is also not unlike our use of “kleenex” as a generic term, but is in fact a registered trademark for the particular tissue made by Kimberly-Clark.

Personal Use of Butter

So here are my butter suggestions.

• Never use margarine
• If using butter buy unsalted (unless recipe calls for salted)
• Butter can be put in a sealed baggie and stored in the freezer
• Keep butter in the fridge, not on the countertop
• I favor European butters as they are creamier
• HealthLine suggests we limit butter intake to 1-2T per day
• I only use straight butter on toast, potato + yams, and broccoli
• Oh, and popcorn
• Otherwise what I do is combine a little bit of butter with good olive oil for sautéing veggies
• I have tasted vegan butter and it works well for cooking

The broader issue is who owns words? I have always said words matter, words can harm, and words can elevate the hearts and souls of people. But what do we do when certain terms become generic like milk, butter, meat, and kleenex. Can any industry own the terms used to describe generic products?

–Patty

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NEWS: ABC in Australia reports: It seems far-fetched but Australian farmers could soon be producing broccoli and cauliflower pills: one serve of vegetables in a tiny capsule.The goals is to create a demand for nutrient-rich powders (and of course supplements) that will create a market for veggie pills and solve the issue of farm waste (estimated at 1.5M tons) and unattractive foods in the process. I already use tomato and mushroom powders in my cooking, adding broccoli and cauliflower would be great.

Articles: Wrote about Garlic.

I am updating the recipes with more details and nutritional counts so I will repost them here as they get updated. Asparagus Red Pepper Scramble, black bean burger, Candy Citrus Peel, and Béchamel Macaroni Cheese .

Tip: To maximize flavor try dry toasting your nuts and spices (or even seeds) before using them. I toast walnuts before adding to salads. Sometimes I “bloom” spices by heating oil and adding ground spices to the oil to help releases fat-soluble flavor compounds (cumin, coriander). But also, using the spiced-oil will help me better distribute the flavor into the dish. The only caution here is ground spices can easily burn, so keep an eye on them when using this technique.