National Post (National Edition)
ON THE BRINK OF A BUTTER REVOLUTION?
‘I COULD JUST TELL BY LOOKING AT IT THAT THIS...WAS SPECIAL’
It may not be one of our most pressing problems, but Canada, home to a fiercely proud and protective dairy industry, is a butter backwater. To peruse the average supermarket’s dairy aisle is to compare nearly identical rectangular white chunks wrapped up in slightly different coloured foil at slightly different prices. The vast majority of offerings, if not all, will contain 80-per-cent butterfat — the legal minimum — made from grainfed Holstein cows’ milk sourced from pools controlled by the provincial dairy farmers’ associations.
Art Hill, a food science professor at the University of Guelph, has some very simple shopping advice: “There’s probably no reason why you shouldn’t just go in and try to find the cheapest brand.” Not only are the products incredibly similar, he says, but many will actually be “coming out of the same churn.” The vast majority of farmers sell their milk into pools, where it’s combined with milk from other farms — and dairies that want to make butter will buy the milk they need from those pools. Unless you like paying for fancy branding,
best save your money.
Perhaps it’s unreasonable to compare Canada to France and other European countries, where certain butters enjoy government-protected production-standards status — just like Champagne, Jamón Ibérico and Parmigiano-reggiano. Depending on the region, in midrange continental supermarkets you’ll find butters of various shapes and sizes, with different butterfat contents — some higher, and thus better for baking — from cows fed different things and flavoured with salt sourced from particular regions. But our American friends, too, enjoy a more diverse domestic butter market — and vastly superior access to foreign products.
If foreign butter invades Canada it is subject to a whopping 298-percent tariff. Even Whole Foods in midtown Toronto offers only a single import: Kiwi Pure, a grass-fed brand from New Zealand, at $11.99 for 250 grams. That’s an eye-watering $22 a pound — and you’ll pay considerably more than that at even higher-end stores.
WE WERE TESTING A DISH, AND I SAW THIS CRAZY-YELLOW PRODUCT. IT WAS CUT IN SQUARES. AND I LOOKED AT (MY CHEFS) AND SAID, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?’ I COULD TELL JUST BY LOOKING AT IT THAT THIS WAS GOOD BUTTER. THIS WAS SPECIAL, RIGHT? — ROB GENTILE
Meanwhile the most expensive butter sold at Le District, a French food market in Lower Manhattan, is US$10. That gets you 250 grams of Isigny Sainte Mère, an appellation contrôlée considered one of the very finest butters in the world. Other French imports go for as little as US$4.95.
Canada has its plucky butter upstarts, though, and Sylvain Charlebois, a business professor at Dalhousie University who studies food production, argues Ontario is leading the pack. Temiskaming Valley butter, made by Thornloe Cheese in Northern Ontario, took the grand prize at this year’s Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto. It has an exclusive supply of milk from grass-fed cows in the area — most within 25 kilometres of the dairy.
Rolling Meadow Dairy makes a similar product from grass-fed cows in Southwestern Ontario; its parent company, Greenspace, owns several organic brands and trades on the TSX Venture Exchange. (It also imports Kiwi Pure.) Stirling Creamery, near Belleville, churns its product to 84-per-cent butterfat. And there are several brands of butter certified organic by DFO. Those will all set you back between $4.99 and $7.99 at higher-end supermarkets and specialty stores.
But Owen Sound natives Drew Mciver and Mitch Yurkiw, both in their early 30s, along with veteran dairy farmer Bill Van Nes, might be at the leading edge of the butter revolution. Their Emerald Grasslands butter ticks every fancy-dairy box: Dfo-certified both grass-fed and organic, cows free to roam, milk churned to 84-per-cent butterfat, and in many cases sourced entirely from Van Nes’s herd of 400-odd Jersey cows, who lead an uncommonly outdoorsy life on a farm near Brussels, Ont., about 30 kilometres from the eastern shore of Lake Huron.
(Can-dairy Inc., Mciver’s and Yurkiw’s company, also partners with two other nearby farms. Emerald Grasslands butter that’s not entirely sourced from the same herd is labelled as “from select Jersey herds.”)
“Fresh air is number one. (The cows) are free to exhibit their natural behaviour in their natural environment,” Van Nes said while showing a National Post delegation where his dry (i.e., non-milking) cows are spending the winter — outside, in a 25-acre lea. “As long as the cows are taken care of and they can get shelter and get fed so they’re full, it works well.”
The surrounding trees provide shade in the summer and a windbreak in winter, allowing the cows to spend maximum time outside. (Combining woodlots and grazing land is an approach known as silvopasture.) Van Nes argued it’s actually warmer in winter for the cows there than in a traditional pole barn, where the “wind whips around.”
The spry, inquisitive Jerseys — smaller and nimbler than the stereotypical black-andwhite dairy cow — munched away on a four-foot pile of sorghum-sudan grass and haylage kept under a tarp, ankle-deep in a pungent mixture of mud and manure that will soon become high-test fertilizer, Van Nes explained. (“You need hip-waders,” one farmhand quipped.) It’s a positive feedback loop known as regenerative farming, Yurkiw explained as we enjoyed thick slabs of Emerald Grasslands butter on sourdough, served from the tailgate of Mciver’s pickup truck. The cows will progressively turn what had been sandy scrubland into ever-more productive grazing land, yielding ever-better milk.
“What we expect here is really good, deep vegetation for the cows to graze this coming year,” said Van Nes of the Jerseys’ winter home. “It’s also economical because we don’t have to spread that manure around with equipment. Cows are doing their own job.”
The outdoor life, and the “single-herd” designation, allow for the fullest expression of “terroir” in the milk, and thereafter the butter. The term refers to all the circumstances of an agricultural product’s development: the air, the altitude, the soil properties, the feed. All should filter down into the final product to be savoured by aficionados, the way oenophiles swirl and sniff and slurp a glass of Barolo — “a signature of the land that these cows are grazing,” says Mciver. He describes Emerald Grasslands as having an “earthy” taste, but also a “clean” one that leaves no greasiness behind — a product of its high butterfat-to-liquid ratio.
The butter isn’t cheap: $9.99 for 250 grams is the suggested retail price, and you can pay more for it. But it is attracting a dedicated fanbase, including in some of Toronto’s finest kitchens. Rob Gentile, the mastermind behind the Buca empire, recalls being astonished first and foremost by the brightyellow colour — a hallmark of grass-fed milk and its byproducts.
“We were testing a dish, and I saw this crazy-yellow product. It was cut in squares. And I looked at (my chefs) and said, ‘What the hell is this?’ ”
“I could tell just by looking at it that this was good butter. This was special, right? Because, you know, butter looks like shit, looks like vegetable oil, most of the time. It’s got that pale, ‘ugh, poor thing’ (quality) to it.”
In the past Buca had used a now-defunct brand of butter from the Ottawa Valley, and more recently ludicrously expensive Italian imports. But now Gentile raves about what Emerald Grasslands brings to a kitchen, particularly when used to emulsify a pasta sauce.
“I looked at (a colleague) and I’m like, ‘You don’t need to do anything to it. Just plate it,’” he recalls. “It was like the heavens opened up.”
Paula Navarrete, chef at David Chang’s Momofuku Kojin in Toronto, says it reminds her of the butter she grew up eating in her native Colombia. She serves it much more simply than Gentile: in a big slab on a flatbread with spiced honey, sumac and Malden sea salt. She says customers come back just asking for bread and butter — “Drew’s butter,” as it’s identified on the menu.
“Sometimes you forget that something so simple can be so amazing,” says Navarrete.
Hill, the food science professor, isn’t sold on the grass-fed, organic and other designations. “I can certainly taste the price,” he says, but “I don’t think I taste the difference.” Well, I sure as heck can. Kiwi Pure, the chasteningly expensive New Zealand import, has a strong, bright, quintessentially buttery taste. To my admittedly inexpert palate, Thornloe’s product is similar but actually better, at a fraction of the price.
But the Emerald Grasslands butter tastes like something different, something off to the side. It has a wonderfully mild, earthy funk to it. “It eats like cheese,” as Mciver puts it. It’s much yellower even than Thornloe’s grass-fed product.
Mciver and Yurkiw have a very unusual business model: Not only are they keeping their milk supply entirely separate from the DFO pools, they own neither the cows nor the dairy that makes the butter. They get their milk exclusively from Van Nes and their other partner farmers, then send it in a DFO truck to a processor to separate the skim milk from butterfat, and thence to Alliston Creamery — the last independent creamery in the province — to churn the butter.
As it stands, you can buy Emerald Grasslands butter at 145 stores in five provinces. In future, Mciver says he would love to open his own dairy somewhere in Grey County, where he and Yurkiw are based. No wonder: if Alliston were to shut down tomorrow, Mciver concedes, they’re be pretty much screwed.
Indeed, those familiar with Canada’s sclerotic, intensely regulated and supply-managed dairy industry might be surprised such an arrangement is even possible. It was only six years ago, after all, that Canada’s dairy regime chased New York State-based Chobani and its beloved Greek yogurt out of Ontario. But while there was plenty of red tape to fight through, Mciver says the Canadian Dairy Commission and DFO have been very supportive of their venture.
They should be: Imports are still a tiny chunk of the Canadian dairy market, but they have steadily increased with each successive free trade agreement. Charlebois, the Dalhousie professor, is a noted critic of Canada’s supply management system; among other things, he argues, it’s a huge disincentive to innovation. But there’s no reason innovation can’t happen under supply management, and the more access foreign milks and butters and cheeses have to the Canadian market, the more incentive there is for Canadian producers to serve premium and niche dairy markets with domestic milk.
Several programs exist to encourage new market entrants and innovative products. Project Farmgate, which DFO launched in 2012, was meant to encourage farmers to open small dairies on their properties. There hasn’t been massive uptake beyond the three initial participants, but they are producing some interesting and unique products, albeit in small quantities. Sheldon Creek Dairy, for example, about 90 minutes northwest of Toronto in Loretto, sells non-homogenized whole milk with the cream congealed on top — the utterly delicious stuff that used to arrive at my English grandmother’s doorstep in glass bottles every morning. (Pour it on Frosted Flakes. It’s outrageous.)
“Just going back 10 or 15 years, the Dairy Farmers really weren’t very supportive of the microprocessors or the on-farm processing,” says Hill. “Those were the good days: They (had) a market for all their milk … but times have changed and they are certainly realizing that … if they’re going to compete with CETA (and the new NAFTA), they really have to work hard promoting value-added products.”
Imported butters might continue to be inaccessible to the Canadian consumer, but there’s no reason domestic producers can’t fill what seems to be a genuine demand. Marianne Den Haan, one of Sheldon Creek’s owner-operators, argues more and more dairy consumers want to know about where their milk comes from — how the cows live, why the farmers are in the business. Her family farm holds an open house every summer, she says; last year, 6,000 people came. Fancy butters might not be forcing their way on to mainstream shelves any time soon, but it’s early days. Most Canadians have probably never even contemplated the idea that butter can be something more than one of the interchangeable brands they grab from the dairy cabinet.
Van Nes used to farm Holsteins with his brother. He’s been on his current property with his Jersey herd for nine years. Asked why he switched breeds, he doesn’t miss a beat. “The butter,” he says. “She’s all golden.” In colour and in taste, he might be on to something.