Better Butter: A Tasting and A Recipe

The amazingly talented Molly Stevens (she of All About Braising) organized a butter tasting at the IACP conference last week and, once again, my favorite butters in the tasting turned out to be the butters I always favor in a tasting, proving both the butters and I must be pretty consistent.

Most of us don’t normally “taste” butter, we use it in baking, cooking or as a bread-topper, but I started tasting butter and studying butter about 7 years ago, after the legendary breadbaker, Lionel Poilane, didn’t want to give me his recipe for his great butter cookies, Punitions, for my book, Paris Sweets, because he didn’t think they’d fare well with American butter.

The good news on the cookie front was that when I arrived in Paris with a pound of Land O’Lakes unsalted butter in my bag and made the cookies with M. Poilane, he pronounced them good enough to be published (see below).  But, in talking about butter, Lionel Poilane set me on a quest for good butter and the search to understand how and why butters differ.  (I wrote about this years ago for The New York Times.  Unfortunately, you have to be a Times Select member to read it.)

Molly did a terrific job of presenting butter in 3 categories:

• Sweet
• High fat
• Cultured

Just to make it easy, sweet butter is what most supermarket butters are.  By law, American butter must be 80% butterfat, and this is what generic supermarket and premium butters like Land O’Lakes come in at.  Ari Weinzweig of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor (another presenter in the tasting) made an interesting point when he noted that most butters naturally have 82% butterfat, so manufacturers remove fat to be at the lowest level of the standard.

In case you were wondering, butterfat is a very good thing in butter – the more butterfat you have, the less water you’ve got and the better the butter will be for baking and cooking.

High-fat butter usually has at least 82% butterfat.  This is the amount of butterfat in Plugra and it’s also the legal minimum amount of fat for butter in France (unless it’s salted, which can have up to 2% less fat).

Just because a butter has more butterfat doesn’t automatically mean that it has more flavor.  Flavor comes from:

• The cream – and its flavor will be dependent on the type of cows and what they’re eating
• Culturing

Cultured butters are la crème de la crème of butter and pretty unusual in the States.  To get cultured butter, a natural culture – think yogurt or crème fraiche – is added to the cream, then the cream is allowed to ferment for about 18 hours before it is churned. 

Clearly, this is a slow and expensive way of making butter and, to add to the expense, most buttermakers who culture their cream go the extra mile and churn their butters in small batches.

If you’re like me, as soon as you taste cultured butter you’ll be hooked.  It has a subtle but seductive tang to it – again, think crème fraiche – and, because it has less water, a texture that is noticeably different, more velvety, than beurre ordinaire. 

Molly said that she found that the high-fat cultured butters really showed their stuff in saucemaking, compound butters and, because of their lower water content, pie crusts.  I’d add that their flavor makes a difference in simple sweets, like shortbreads and plain butter cookies (see the recipe below).

So here’s what was on that butter tasting plate pictured above.  From 12:00 going clockwise, there’s:

• Land O’Lakes
• Pastureland, made by a cooperative in Minnesota
• Kerrygold Irish Butter, a cultured butter
• Kerrygold Irish Salted Irish Butter, also cultured
• Echire, a small production cultured butter from France with 84% butterfat
• Vermont Butter and Cheese Co, a small-batch cultured butter with 86% butterfat
• Vermont Butter and Cheese Co butter with sea salt crystals, also cultured, with a butterfat content of about 84%
• Goat’s milk butter – which accounts for its white color

My favorites: The butters from Echire and the Vermont Butter and Cheese Co. butters.

To finish the tasting, we nibbled on Lionel Poilane’s Punitions made with three different butters.  Here’s a picture taken in the wonderful Poilane bakery on the rue du Cherche Midi the afternoon we baked the cookies together.

If you want to have your own taste test, here’s the recipe:

French Butter Cookies/Les Punitions

From Paris Sweets, adapted from Lionel Poilane

Makes about 50 cookies

1 1/4 sticks (5 ounces; 140 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature

Slightly rounded 1/2 cup (125 grams) sugar

1 large egg, at room temperature

2 cups (280 grams) all-purpose flour

Put the butter in the work bowl of a food processor fitted with the metal blade and process, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed, until the butter is smooth.  Add the sugar and process and scrape until thoroughly blended into the butter.  Add the egg and continue to process, scraping the bowl as needed, until the mixture is smooth and satiny.  Add the flour all at once, then pulse 10 to 15 times, until the dough forms clumps and curds and looks like streusel.

Turn the dough out onto a work surface and gather it into a ball.  Divide the ball in half, shape each half into a disk, and wrap the disks in plastic.  If you have the time, chill the disks until they are firm, about 4 hours.  If you’re in a hurry, you can roll the dough out immediately; it will be a little stickier, but fine.  (The dough can be wrapped airtight and refrigerated for up to 4 days or frozen for up to 1 month.)

Position the racks to divide the oven into thirds and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (180 C).  Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Working with one disk at a time, roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface until it is between 1/8 and 1/4 inch (4 and 7 mm) thick.  Using a 1 1/2 –inch (4-cm) round cookie cutter, cut out as many cookies as you can and place them on the lined sheets, leaving about 1 inch (2.5 cm) space between them.  (You can gather the scraps into a disk and chill them, then roll, cut and bake them later.)

Bake the cookies for 8 to 10 minutes, or until they are set but still pale.  (If some of the cookies are thinner than others, the thin ones may brown around the edges.  M. Poilane would approve.  He’d tell you the spots of color here and there show they are made by hand.)  Transfer the cookies to cooling racks to cool to room temperature.

Keeping:  The cookies can be kept in a tin at room temperature for about 5 days or wrapped airtight and frozen for up to 1 month.

Comments

[Dorie]

Tanya, how interesting that you used to churn butter from buttermilk. I'm imagining that the flavor of the butter had a distinct tang -- but then, I'm imagining that your buttermilk tastes like American buttermilk.

The buttermilk that I use in Baking From My Home to Yours is storebought and ready-made, although, if I want to make a recipe that calls for buttermilk and I have none on hand, I make a mixture of yogurt and milk, using 2/3 cup yogurt and 1/3 cup milk to make 1 cup of buttermilk.

I wish I could tell you how to make cultured butter at home, but I don't have the answer.

I'm delighted that you're baking from my book, enjoying it and having success with the recipes. There's nothing that makes me happier than to learn that we've got another convert to baking. Welcome!

[Tanya]

Hi Dorie,

Today only I found your blog . Hurrah!

& what a coincidenc!

After owning 'Baking from my home to yours' & 'choc desserts by PH', become so thrilled!

I'm not a baker at all. but after trying some of your recipes(almost-fudge gateau/coconut tea cake) fr. your 'baking' makes confident that i can bake too!

This is such a helpful post regd. butter.

Being Indian, we used to churned butter(aka makkhan) fr. buttermilk.

Oftenlyy, i become confused , for any baking recipe calls for 'buttermilk' what exactly does it mean? Buttermilk made by indian method or buttermilk obtained fr. western way.( add lemon juice in milk and so on)

Precisely, your note on buttermilk (baking from my home to yours) is more over related to indian method of making buttermilk.

can you give exact proportion of yoghurt (crème fraiche) and creme for cultured butter?

Anyways, thanks a lot for sharing all informations/ideas thru UR books or UR blog, with us .

Bregds,

tanya

[Dorie]

Lauren, I would bet that making butter at home with great milk is a true treat. Sadly, for so many of us, finding great milk is a problem. I can get raw milk in Connecticut, so I'll give buttering a whirl.

I recenty heard a terrific story from Martha Foose, who is the executive chef for Viking Range company. She makes her own butter and she makes it in a paint-mixing machine, you know, one of those automatic shakers. Evidently, when she told Ari Weinzweig about her better butter technique, he liked the idea so much he installed a paint mixer in his store, Zingerman's, and they now whip up butter on the spot.

[Lauren]

Thanks for this great post! I am ready to jump out of bed and make some muffins so I have something good to spread with butter!

I encourage everyone to try making your own butter from the milk of cows that produce high-butterfat milk (like Jerseys). We recently started getting all of our milk raw from a local dairy with a mixed herd of Guernsey, Jersey, Holstein, Brown Swiss and Ayrshire. I have yet to try making cultured butter (that's my next project) but making sweet butter is as easy as whipping room temperature cream in a Kitchenaid mixer until the buttermilk and butter separate. An extra whipping after washing also improves the texture. This is an easy and very satisfying activity!

The best part is how the taste and look of the butter changes with the seasons. During the winter, the butter is whitish and the flavor quite mild because the cows are eating hay. As soon as the grass came up, the butter was a rich golden hue and had a delicious, almost "grassy" edge to it. Yum yum.

[veron]

Thanks for the butter tasting notes. I've never heard about cultured butter but I shall try Vermont Butter and Cheeses's.

[Mmm]

I'm no scientist, but having been reading everything I could get my hands on lately about making cheese, I've learned a few things I would never have thought anyone I know would want!

The culture is an acid whose purpose is to break down the fat globules so they will adhere together (into butter). It used to be that soured cream was used for this purpose (i.e., unhomogenized milk was allowed separate and the cream was allowed to sour or acidify). A little cultured buttermilk will do the trick now.

Or you can make uncultured butter just by beating the heck out of heavy cream. But it probably won't taste as good.

[Dorie]

Mmm -- thank you for adding so many interesting points to the discussion. And, of course, you're right -- the goal of large industrial buttermakers is to take the terroir *out* of their products, so that they will always be the same, no matter where the milk comes from.

Rob -- I led a deprived childhood: we never took a trip to anyplace where butter was being made. In fact, the one food-related field trip I can remember was to the WonderBread plant!

I've never made homemade butter and I'm not sure how you would culture it. To culture butter a "culture", is it an enzyme?, is added to the cream so that it ferments. It's similar to what is added to cream to make creme fraiche or to milk to make yogurt.

I wonder if you could make creme fraiche and then churn it? Doesn't that sound like it would work?

[Mmm]

I don't "really know this," but, the influences of terroir and seasonality in farmstead and artisinal dairy products seem totally reversed in the mass manufacturing process, where uniformity hinges on successfully taking the terroir *out* of the process.

The answer to the question of consistency seems necessarily to begin with the commingling of milk from a few thousand co-op member dairies within a 100-mile radius (as it does in at least one Land o'Lakes plant). Scientists and engineers -- not artisans -- take over from there.

Land o'Lakes even has a division called "Ingredient Solutions," which, they say, exists "to develop custom ingredients that help manufacturers achieve specific flavor, appearance and performance goals."

Artisans need not apply.

Cooks Illustrated provides some good, and much more complete answers here: http://tinyurl.com/ysuqqt

[rob]

Hi Dorie. I was wondering what your thoughts are on homemade butter as a way around grocery store quality. I seem to remember making butter on field trips in elementary school, and a Google search reveals it's as easy as pouring cream into a stand mixer, running it for a while, and draining off the buttermilk. That would make for an interesting flavour comparison. Also, any ideas on what one would have to do to make homemade cultured butter?

[Dorie]

Alison, you raise a fascinating question about the quality of cream the big-time butter producers get. I don't know the "real" answer to this question and if someone does, I hope he or she will jump in. Here's what I think I know. Companies like Land o'Lakes get their cream from farmers who are part of the Land O'Lakes cooperative, which I would think means that the cows are raised and fed according to strict guidelines.

You mention consistency and I've always been struck by how consistent Land O'Lakes butter is. The quality, which I consider high, is always the same -- ditto the texture, taste and color. No matter the season, the butter is the same, which is not at all the story with artisanal or small-batch butters. With these butters, what the cows eat changes with the seasons and so the butter changes too.

Please -- I'd love to hear from someone who really knows this. It's such an interesting point.

[Alison]

Thank you for posting this discussion about butter for those who do not subscribe to the Times, it was very interesting! One question - Do the big time producers of butter (i.e. Land o Lakes, Mid-American Farms)contract with farms spread across the whole United States? If so, will their end products vary from batch to batch because not all of the cows will be under the same conditions on the farms? Because the cream is so vital to flavor and the cream is dependent on the cow's environment wouldn't there be some natural variatoin within the same product line? Sorry for so many questions, its just my curious mind in motion.

[Freya]

Fascinating article. When I started cooking seriously, switching for margarine to butter was one of the first things I did. Now we eat butter with everything, purely because we prefer the taste. We use an Italian Butter (with a cow embossed on it) for 'eating' and Wheelbarrow butter for cooking with. Both have are unsalted and have a delicate, but defined flavour. The 'cow' butter is truly sublime though and I could almost eat it alone! The Kerrygold is considered over here to be one of the cheaper butters, although the spreadable is quite useful when you can't be bothered to wait for it to soften!

[Ivonne]

Dorie,

This was a very interesting read. To be honest, until very recently I never really gave much thought to butter. I knew that the butter that I usually buy in the supermarket (which is what I use to bake with) isn't on the same level as Plugra, but I never really bothered to stop and think about what makes good butter.

I've yet to see Plugra here in Toronto or any other types of butter such as the cultured ones you referred to.

I see I'll have to spend some time studying butter. Good think it's so delicious!

[Blame It on Paris]

Thank you for this, Dorie! I used to live near a cremerie and buy butters there in Paris, and back in the U.S. we are constantly trying new butters to try to find a good one. Without much success usuall, unfortunately, although we finally last week found a local dairy farm here that does fresh cultured butter that is pretty good. I will have to look for the Vermont Co. ones you recommend.

Laura Florand

[Dorie]

Steamy Kitchen, buying organic is always a good idea, although I've never done a tasting between organic and conventional butters. For me, the most obvious taste differences are between cultured and non-cultured butters (and, of course, between salted and unsalted). But, as with everything, the quality of the raw ingredients is crucial. With butter, that means the quality of the cream and, by extension, what the cows fed on, how far away they are from the buttery and, therefore, how long a time lapse there is between collecting the milk and processing it and, related to that, how the milk is cared for from the start. It's not so simple, is it?

[Steamy Kitchen]

I never thought to taste butter....just pretty much figured butter is butter! The funny thing is I live an hour from Land O Lakes but have never bought their butter. I will do a taste test next week. Have you tasted difference between Organic and non-Organic? I try to buy Organic version of any dairy.

[T.W. Barritt]

Dorie, This is such a helpful post on the rarely discussed qualities of butter. I was only somewhat aware of the different styles of butter and their fat content. Putting this into terms similar to wine tasting makes it easily understandable! It really makes you think about the flavor of the final product in baking. I'm going to print this out, and keep it with my baking references. Thanks so much!

[Dorie]

I can understand why you miss the butter in France, Helen. As I was reading your comment, it made me think of how, in France, when spring comes, friends will often say, "Look, you can tell spring is coming - the butter is getting more and more yellow!" Of course this happens because the cows are eating grass instead of hay. I love it!

I think Kerrygold is a good choice for the price and, you're right -- the imported French butters can be very expensive, depending on where you have to shop.

[Helen]

Oh how i love and miss my butter...my parents tease me that is practically the only thing I eat when I go home. Here I use Kerrygold most of the time as it fits my budget a little bit more easily than cultured butter which I find for $5.99 for 8 oz...

[Dorie]

Mercedes, it's fascinating to hear about what butters are being used in Syria -- thank you for sharing this information with us. And, no, you didn't get carried away -- I'd love to hear more.

Vicky, I'm so happy you made the cookies and liked them. It was a great idea to add the cocoa. These cookies are very plain and they'll take to variations, you can add citrus zest, spices, even chopped nuts or chocolate, and they'll always be good.

[Vicky]

I made the cookies and they were great! My sister gobbled them up. I had a little bit of dough left from the scraps so I kneaded half of it with a little cocoa powder until it was dark brown and layered it with the other half in checkerboard fashion. I rolled it into a log and froze it. I cut eensie weensie little cookies out of it and baked them. They were a little lopsided, but delicious.

[Mercedes]

Thanks for such an interesting post. I've been buying Kerrygold recently on a friend's recommendation (granted, he's Irish), and really enjoying it.
Also, when I lived in the Middle East, Plugra and Lurpak are the common brands of butter (and super cheap). Even poor people in Syria use it, which struck me as ironic, they use better butter than Americans do.
They also use samne, which is sort of like ghee, and has the most wonderful aroma, but I'm getting carried away...

[Dorie]

Thank you all for writing such really interesting comments.

Take a look at Molly Steven's comment for a good look at how to do the math when it comes to butterfat. As Molly says, it would be great if American buttermakers would list their butters' butterfat content on the label the way many chocolatemakers now do. Interestingly, in France, both chocolate and butter makers must label their products.

VJ, about clarified butter: It's not something I use very often, but it would make sense that the better the butter you start with, the better the clarified butter you end up with. Also - -and remember, math is not my subject -- it would seem that if you start with a butter with a higher butterfat content, then you would get more clarified butter/pound than if you used a butter with a lower fat content and therefore more water.

[Molly]

You hit the nail on the head – manufacturers lower the butterfat content because of cost, and because they can! They do it quite simply by adding water to the butter, so, as Dorie points out lower fat = higher moisture. If 2% seems like a slim difference, consider the difference between whole milk (which has 4% milkfat) and low-fat milk, what we call 2%. It's a big difference! If you do the math the other way, there's almost 50% more water in an 80% (generic American butter) and an 86% butter (like Vermont Butter & Cheese butter). So, it really is a big difference. I encourage you to try a piecrust or cookies with one of these higher fat butters. You'll be impressed, I promise.

Perhaps someday butter manufacturers will start boating the butterfat percentages on their packaging – the chocolates do now.

Thanks, Dorie, for the cookie recipe and the wonderful photo of you and M. Poilane.

[Rona]

If most butters have 82% butterfat why do the manufacturers remove it? Seems it would be better to give the public a tastier and better product, no? Must have something to do with cost. I also favor Echire and Vermont Butter although I haven't tried baking with them. Their taste alone is incredible.
Punitions are wonderful but I always eat too many! Just one more...and before I know, an entire bag is gone!
That is such a lovely photo of you and M. Poilane. It must have been an awesome experience baking with him. The bakery is always my first stop when I visit Paris. I dream about the apple tarts.