GET CULTURED
How to put fancy, high-fat butter to its best use
As more European-style butters commingle in the dairy case with central-casting stick styles, what used to be a simple salted or unsalted, basic or fancy choice has become mind-bending. Yet everyday cooks don’t need to read a lactic science paper to understand how to make chichi butter choices. It boils down to buttering (topical usage) and baking. What’s your endgame? Are you slathering a hot, crunchy piece of toast to eat alongside your morning coffee? Or maybe you’re buttering a lightly steamed bunch of fresh, warm asparagus or plump peas? Do you routinely bake chocolate birthday cake, or are you more a Danish butter cookie baker?
Since flavor matters most, consider multiple factors (outlined here) before buying swanky butter. It’s going to be expensive, compared with your mother’s supermarket spread, but price alone shouldn’t define your choice. First, let’s review the law of the land for basic grocery store butters.
What is basic butter?
For context refer to this flowchart: Milk comes from cows > cream comes from milk > cream gets pasteurized > this cream is churned into butter.
USDA commercial butter basics: All U.S. butter must be at least 80% butterfat. (That leaves about 18% as water and 1 to 2% milk solids.)
European/European-style butter: Contains a higher butterfat percentage (82-86%) than basic butter and less water, resulting in a richer taste, softer texture and faster melt-ability. Look for Echire (my favorite) or the more widely available Plugra. Beurre d’Isigny is also good, and Le Beurre Bordier is the butter folks buy as if it’s a fine wine.
Cultured: Added to pasteurized cream, live bacterial cultures release lactic acid while the mixture thickens and develops flavor (through fermentation) before being churned into butter. This is where a specific butter personality is developed. The taste has tang, along with other distinctive flavor notes that define it. Culturing takes time — and highquality cream from cows enjoying green pastures and a life free of antibiotics — to achieve premium butter. While most European butters are cultured, not all cultured butters are European. Look for Organic Valley Cultured Butter or my overall No. 1 butter choice, Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter, with 82% butterfat.
Salted vs. unsalted: Salt helps to preserve butter, creating a longer shelf life. European-style butter makers go to great lengths to match their desired salt crystal size and provenance to their butter.
Grass-fed: In a perfect world, grass-fed butter comes from the cream of the milk of cows that have been 100% grass-fed. Authentic versions possess more nutrients than the alternative, particularly more vitamins A, D and K2, as well as five times the beneficial fatty acid CLA (conjugated linoleic acid). The butter tends to have a naturally yellow color as a result of the vege
tation in the cows’ diet. But beware: Brands will claim “grass-fed” if the cows eat some grass. Because of seasonal climate fluctuations, rarely would a large commercial company have the capacity to procure milk from cows grazing all year on grass. Much of the butter billed as grass-fed includes milk of supplementary grain-fed cows. Irish label Kerrygold is the poster child for grass-fed butter, and Vital Farms is a widely sold domestic brand.
Organic: The butter must be made from cream from cows that are given no antibiotics or growth hormones and eat feed devoid of conventional pesticide, fertilizer or synthetic ingredients. Organic butter can come from the cream of grass-fed cows or organic grain-fed animals. Humboldt Creamery Butter is certified organic, and about 80% of its cows’ diet is grass.
Buttering (topical usage)
If you’re a die-hard morning toast eater, bougie butter may be your Achilles’ heel. Give in to it. There is nothing that will make you happier than a cultured, European-style unsalted butter slathered on toast with a sprinkling of crunchy salt on top.
Baking
When baking with bougie butter, my rule is simple: If the baked good I’m making relies on butter as a dominant flavor — think Irish shortbread, Danish butter cookies or Breton butter cake — then I’ll invest in the best butter available. If baking a seasonal fruit dessert where the essential luscious flavor of a berry or stone fruit is the star, then an 82% cultured or sweet cream butter plays a supporting role. And for your kid’s birthday cakes, just use basic butter.
As for pie pastry, I’ve baked my basic dough recipe with a half-dozen different butters, and they’ve all worked fine using the same ratios of ingredients; flour, butter, salt and water. However, higher butterfat means less water, which could lead to more difficulty handling the dough. You may find that it gets sticky, or it falls apart. This is easily remedied by toggling the pastry back and forth from the refrigerator while you’re working it if it warms too much. If you’re a novice pie dough maker, stick with the lower butterfat versions (80-82%) for more predictable results.
Bottom line
After sampling a dozen types, my barometer for bankrolling fancy butter has come down to this: I’m a locavore. I prefer butter made from milk that comes from cows of known origin, from as close to my home as possible, where the cream is pasteurized and cultured and left to ferment over time to achieve a nutty, tangy 82% to 86% butterfat content.
Choose the Europeanstyle butter that contains the qualities most appealing to you. Buy a few different brands. Take them home and taste each one separately on the same type of crusty bread. Test-drive them by using each in a favorite simple butterforward baking recipe and do a side-by-side taste test. Before long, you’ll know what side your bread is buttered on.
Lucinda Scala Quinn is a cookbook author and freelance writer.