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Back in India milk used to be delivered by milkmen everyday.
It was unpasteurized, so my mom would boil it and let it cool before consumption, which left a thick slice of cream on top of it.
It was collected, and after several weeks worth had accumulated, yogurt was used to ferment it for a few days and then churned to make white homemade butter. It tasted divine with a little salt and pepper on bread.
Of course, a lot of that butter was used to make Ghee, whose delicious smell permeated the whole home.
And the brown leftover,after making ghee, milk solids tasted amazing with a little sugar.
Ah, the memories...
Memories... yes, indeed. We had one step further. We had our own cow (just one). Although the effort involved from feeding the cow (that didn’t necessarily yield much milk compare to those special breeds), milking it at 6am, collecting cream over many days was eye opening to me. I used to help churn the butter with the wooden thingy meant for it. Yes, the butter tasted amazing, partly because we felt it had to, for all the hard work gone in to it :)
I grew up eating that. And yes I did savour the the brown residue with roti/paratha, enhanced with a bit of sugar. That's why I can never eat margarine. I do my best to buy the best quality butter from the supermarkets here in Melbourne, Australia. But that rich taste of the homemade stuff is hard to reproduce on an industrial scale, I reckon! On the other hand, I don't miss the Yoghurt from back home. I much prefer the Greek Yoghurt I get here! :)
I came back to my hometown due to this lockdown and had the pleasure of having homemade butter again. Good heavens, it was peak gourmet if there is anything like it. The best part : I learnt how to make it.
Isn't the smell of ghee (especially when making at home) too strong?
I remember someone in the house making it and I couldn't breathe in the kitchen when it was there.
We still do that. This exact same process.
you described exactly my childhood experience.. definitely a wonderful memory to cherish
> And the brown leftover,after making ghee, milk solids tasted amazing with a little sugar.
Wait, what? I love ghee but have never made it. Are you saying there's something even tastier to be found in the process of making it???
Interesting to see this article pop up. I recently became obsessed with finding the best butter after having some on a trip to France last year, and so I rounded up a few contenders and my wife and I did a double-blind taste test. All butter was demi-sel. Results were:
1. Échiré
2. Rodolphe Le Meunier
3. Isigny Sainte-Mère
4. Bordier (!)
5. Clover
Échiré though is amazing. I can't get enough of it. I honestly didn't like butter all that much before trying it, and now I use it in everything I can. There's just something about how creamy and unusually flavorful it is.
Even before clicking through the the article I was guessing that this was Diane's butter. Six or seven years ago when still living in the bay area I took my parents to the French Laundry when they visited and we all chuckled when the waiter brought out the butter with the bread and made a point of talking about Diane and her cows. To this day we still talk about how amazing that butter was. I can pop down the road and pick up Isigny Sainte-Mere, Echire, and a few others fresh over the channel from France and I still pine for Diane St. Clair's... (At this point I am willing to concede that this is probably less about the absolute quality than the memories linked to same, but it was amazingly good butter.)
Échiré is fantastic, if a bit steep. It's fairly easy to get in Paris, and you can find it in London if you know where to look. Bizarrely, I've only ever seen the demi sel in London.
Interesting! I have had St. Clair's and would put it in the middle as a very good butter but not one that I'd go to the ends of the earth for. I like Clover a lot but my wife finds it, like Kerrygold, verging on fishy. My favorite butter of all time is from another Northern California restaurant, Manresa. Vividly yellow, clearly unpasteurized, aggressively grassy. The downside of course is that unpasteurized butter is not the safest food and probably has a shelf life of two days, so it's not like a commercial butter, no matter how perfectly produced, could taste the same.
I'm not sure these sorts of head-to-head taste tests reveal that much about how enjoyable a butter is at table. One of my favorite seafood restaurants is a small chain in Paris, Le Bar à Huitres (pretty funny to me that it's literally Oyster Bar, kind of like a steakhouse called "Steakhouse"). They have these absurd seafood platters laden with delicacies that I had never heard of like sea snails, but the sides are really interesting. Mignonette and lemon (obligatory), but also a tiny can of rillettes (?), a piece of baguette, and Bordier butter. The butter was really wasted in the context of the seafood, in my opinion.
If you like butter, one I see pretty often is just labeled "German butter". Lightly cultured and salted, very tasty. I wish I could get beurre d'Isigny on the regular, but I'm not making a special trip into the city.
Maybe it's all subjective but I am willing to pay a premium for Kerrygold (Irish) because I read once that the cows are grass fed and am imagining the butter tastes a lot better.
It's very interesting how much the price can fluctuate in the same store (50%) so the margins are decent I suppose.
I’m not a butterphile, but if you find yourself near a Wegmans on the east coast, the butter boy butter is pretty outrageous.
I could probably just eat it like cheese.
I can vouch for that assessment of Clover. It has flavor, but not in a particularly pleasant way. I've had better luck with unrecognizable bargain brand premium butters.
Interesting, I felt Échiré was more or less indistinguishable from Isigny Sainte-Mère, but that Rodolphe Le Meunier was in a league of its own.
Have you tried Plugra? I love it and it’s amazing but I can’t help but I can almost feel my arteries clogging when I use it.
Butter quality varies widely around the world and within countries. The distance from very good to very poor quality butter in terms of the eating experience is incredibly large. Very good butter is unreasonably delicious and addictive, it is a completely different food product compared to the poor quality equivalent. I wouldn't pay an order of magnitude more for the world's best butter, because great butter doesn't need to cost that much, but I would definitely pay an integer factor more for excellent butter versus terrible butter.
That said, I've been able to find great butter in most ethnically European countries. It requires a bit of effort in some locales but it is usually available if you know where to look.
Is this butter is one of those things like really high quality olive oil where its only worth it for eating in its natural state because cooking with it destroys the fine qualities that make it worth it? I love butter but haven’t managed to find anything mind blowing so went back to commodity butter because 90% of the time I cook with it.
I'm from Denmark, but emigrated at an early age to the U.S, I always hated butter until I came back to Denmark, so if you had asked me 20 years ago I would have said hell no, but now I have managed to taste some really good butters and maybe it is worth that much, just like a good cheese would be.
> if you had asked me 20 years ago I would have said hell no, but now I have managed to taste some really good butters and maybe it is worth that much, just like a good cheese would be.
I had the same thing occur with wine, I'm from California but I went to Catholic school so wine to me was this forced ritual thing that tasted horribly. I even did a short in upscale catering while paying for University and still didn't 'get' wine despite tasting what I was told was 'good wine' all the time. I like(d) aged single malt whisky and vodka.
But when I went to Italy and Croatia I learned how a cuisine can be entirely built around the seasons and that wine played a big part of its enhancement.
I've had really good butters from Switzerland while doing my apprenticeship, not sure the costs but it wouldn't surprise me if that was the rate, and despite my affinity for comparing seasonal/aged cheeses (especially with fruit) I simply couldn't tell the difference. It made logical sense for the same reason it does in cheese, the grazing and vegetation/feed pattern varies, but my palette couldn't tell the difference in finding the 'lavender and wild flower notes' these artisan guys went on about. Then again, I'm more of a olive oil person anyway, and that easily exceeds $50/liter so I understood their is a market for that and just nodded.
As a chef later in life I had the same experience as hearing the sommelier talk about 'after notes of butter scotch, and whiffs of toffy' when describing what I thought was a rather mediocre chardonnay during pre-service with food pairing once: a lot of is just branding, but I'm glad it exists as its a big part of restaurant sales. But I just shrugged it off, and never ordered it myself.
I'm basing this of San Francisco (I haven't been anywhere else). Presuming that SF is representative for the US, then IMO: tap water, milk, butter, bread and cheese in the US isn't that great. For me those things are what I basically live off every morning. The US has other things that are up to par or better than stuff in European countries, but those 5 things aren't that great unfortunately.
US people have complained about a lot of things where I lived when it comes to food, but not those five.
On the other end of the scale, when I grew up in Korea our cheese tasted like congealed mayo with food coloring, and our "ham" was made of ground fish and flour. I didn't know the taste of an actual ham until I went to America for studying.
These days I think it's not as bad, though Korea's major beer brands are still all shit.
The US produces some truly fabulous butter but you may not have had it. Industrial economy grade butter in the US can be quite poor, I don't like that either.
Out of curiosity what is the reputation of Lurpak like in Denmark? It's top shelf butter in most mainstream supermarkets in the UK and Australia.
I've had the same experience, but at home we usually had margarine or some other cheap butter replacement. My girlfriend insisted on getting real, salted butter and I have a newfound appreciation for it now.
I had this butter once at a restaurant not long after this article was originally published. I was excited to try it and while the color was indeed distinctive, just as the photos show, I did not notice it being noticeably better than other nice butters you get at very good restaurants (this particular one had 2 Michelin stars).
If they say it's the world's best, I'll believe them. I definitely do not have the most refined palate. I love the smell of great coffee but don't really taste the difference.
Getting the experience of tasting the best butter in the WORLD for 50 dollars/pound? Of course.
Would I be having it every day? Of course not.
A related read about how an Irish Dairy company conquered the discerning butter segment:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-10-02/how-irish...
We need double blind studies to see if it is. My prediction: nobody will be able to tell if it's $50 or $5 a pound, same as most people can't tell if they're drinking red wine or white wine with red food coloring, or tell apart an audiophile speaker cable and a wire coat hanger.
> We need double blind studies to see if it is.
See my comment elsewhere in the thread; my wife and I did this (sample size of 2, but still...) There's definitely a difference between supermarket butter and "premium" butter — whether that's worth $50 is a matter of debate. I think the difference between butter brands is much more pronounced than differences between wine though.
I watch a YouTube series where experts compare two of the things that they're an expert in. (Food/drink wise, that is.) They then have to pick which is more expensive.
They virtually always get it right. Though I think the trick is in the formulation; it's not "is this thing $50 or $5," it's "which of these two is the expensive one?" Several episodes, the person says something like "I actually think this one is better, but I know that it's the cheaper one." I think one, if I recall, was mint chocolate chip ice cream. "This is the cheap one but it tastes like what you're imagining when I say "mint chocolate chip ice cream," this other one has higher quality ingredients but you may actually prefer the iconic one."
Have you tried higher quality butters? The difference is palpable, and can be easily picked out by uneducated palates under blind conditions.
Whether this butter is that noticeably different to other super high grade butters I wouldn't know, but I've frequently run into people who treat butter as some undifferentiated fat, which seems generally to be due to lack of exposure to the real thing.
I can taste and smell a difference between grass fed beef butter and cow feed (mixture of hay and corn usually). I've done so in blind tests before.
My favorite butters are French cultured butters and I prefer salted over unsalted. The tanginess you get from culture elevates the taste of butter to a whole other level.
I may be able to make a difference on butter (I used to manufacture my own dairy, my grandparents had a small cow farm), but I can distinguish wine. Nobody can distinguish audio by the type of cable unless you use a defective or extremely thin cable, so the wire coat hanger test is not needed.
I'm for buying slightly more expensive butter if that would incentivize breeding cows for milk rather than meat. Butter still being more of a small treat than main source of fats.
In case you didn't know:
For anyone living in Canada (which has a serious lack of quality dairy products), I'd heartily recommend Emerald Grasslands butter. It's superb. Grass fed, Jersey cows, fantastic flavour.
Butteridge's law of headlines
I would definitely try it once if I could get my hands on a pound.
I have been cooking more with the lockdown.
Relevant SMBC https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/milk
"Dandelion-yellow and uncommonly expensive, St. Clair's butter is served at Thomas Keller's restaurants and is only available once a year to consumers."
On the one hand, reading about this article makes me drool.
On the other, it generates such bullshit highbrow scarcity that it makes me hate haute cuisine.
....I'll take my my first world problem.
"No, it isn't."
There ya go.
Why not just hydroponically grow excellent grass feed at scale for milk cows for making good butter and destroy that market?
It seems like a problem that can be cracked with comparative plant tissue analysis and replicated by proper plant lighting and nutrition schedules.
Thus begins the decline of hacker news into mainstream clickbait. Mark my words.
Alternatively, consider plant based butter if you're concerned about climate change and don't want to support industrial animal farming (i.e. same reasoning behind plant based burgers which seem popular on here: make the product directly from plants instead of inefficiently feeding plants to cows first):
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225411135_Comparati...
> The margarine products analysed here are more environmentally favourable than the butter products. In all three markets (UK, DE and FR) the margarine products are significantly better than the butter products for the categories global warming potential,eutrophication potential and acidification potential