Is the world's best butter worth 50 dollars a pound? (2017)
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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...
I remember someone in the house making it and I couldn't breathe in the kitchen when it was there.
My parents never made ghee (they're ethnic tamils from Malaysia), but good lord frying fish, or making fermented shrimp paste...yuck.
Even now sometimes I make Ghee at home with store bought organic butter, as it's difficult to find organic ghee. Unfortunately it doesn't smell the same.
In fact, if food has too much ghee in it, it can make us want to throw up! We seem to have no problem with butter itself, but the smell of ghee is just too difficult to stomach for us.
But I love ghee. In fact, after a short stint on a Keto diet, looking at the results, I now understand why ghee is essential in every meal! It makes you consume less carbs.
Because of industry propaganda blaming food fat, we have been used to low fat foods. A spoonful of ghee in every meal is not bad. You just need to get used to it.
For some reason, that same love has not been inherited by his son (my father) or his grandchildren. Strangely, however, we shared very similar tastes in everything else!
The only product/by-product I never liked was the buttermilk left over after churning the butter, but I guess that is an acquired taste.
My dad drinks the stuff as a special treat. It just smells like sour milk to me...
The buttermilk you buy in the store is basically fermented milk. It has a totally different flavor and texture. It is also delicious and you should totally make fried chickenburgers with it. You should also make biscuits, pancakes, cornbread, etc with it (assuming you eat those things) because buttermilk has an amazing flavor that's really unlike anything else.
Am curious, is it the enzymes or the acidity? yogurt also tenderizes meat, but I always thought it was the mild acidity that does that, similar to how vinegar can also tenderize meats.
Not that it matters, as long as the job is done :)
I'm surprised there isn't a unique name for that.
"The staff used in the churn is known as the dash, dasher-staff, churn-staff, churning-stick, plunger, plumper, or kirn-staff."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter_churn#Types_of_butter_c...
Mattie in "True Grit", after declining coffee
Next time you visit India, or where you're from, try to dry some yogurt and use that as the culture. I have a feeling that that might work.
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???
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.
both results were for 250g (half pound) of demi sel
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 ignorant to the way much livestock in the world is treated/fed/etc. and I'm aware of the US corn lobby, for example. But coming from Ireland I'm still constantly surprised at how unusual people seem to find grass-fed cattle.
"Grass-fed" isn't a term we use / recognise here, because... it's implicit. Kerrygold is the mass-produced, big-brand butter, and yes it is grass fed. Just like everything else.
That said, this makes me curious about the other listed brands. I'm assuming grass-fed is the norm (northern-?)Europe-wide, so most of the above (being French???) should also be?
It does not involve hormones, but it does involve afaik a very specific feeding regime, both times and content - and the content has no grass.
The resulting milk, as you would expect, is similar to making love in a canoe.
Americans, on the other hand, perfects cheap meat yield. That involves feeding corn to cows, not grass.
A Canadian guy I met once, who grew up on a farm, said their cows were grass fed but a few weeks before slaughter, they would switch the feed to corn, because that way the meat tastes less grassy - making it excellent quality (because grass) and excellent flavor (because no grass). Wouldn’t know myself being vegetarian for a few decades now.
Japan seems to be generally good at doing this sort of thing (taking a premium product and trying to improve scientifically), see e.g. whisky, wagyu, etc. but as far as I've heard they primarily import dairy.
And at the same time how sad most of the meat was relative to US standards.
Similarly: Iberico ham -- the pigs are fed acorns several months before slaughter.
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.
I could probably just eat it like cheese.
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.
That's most of what I get, I've picked up other butters that have the same shade and haven't been disappointed.
US people have complained about a lot of things where I lived when it comes to food, but not those five.
It's not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Public_Utilities...
I jest of course, but seriously, all regions have a ton of variety of breads and bakeries. Even tiny podunk towns you wouldn't know existed...
[I'm a cheese and bread snob from Switzerland FWIW - I could be somewhat convinced that the wholewheat bread choices are not perfect though]
I sometimes make butter from raw milk, which available in h th he state I live in now. It is very good. Most of the time I just keep finlandia or kerrygold around. I cook with Cabot butter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_water_supply_sys...
https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/policy/energy-enviro...
[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11674188/hetch-hetchy-waters-epic-...
The only exception to this is water from the taps in Yosemite Park. That was amazing water.
Cheese is a case-by-case basis, the US produces some very good and unique proper cheeses. But I would give the edge to Europe. I would also agree that the default quality of butter is higher in much of Europe, though similar quality is produced in the US if you want it.
Bread is largely done better in the US in 2020. There was a time when that was most assuredly not the case, but it seems to be consistently the case today. I spend a large part of my life in Europe and the bread quality is not what I am used to in Seattle. Similar bread experiences exist in many other parts of the US. American bread has become remarkably good over the last few decades.
Flint, MI probably has a thing or two to say...
Having spent some time in Arizona, that's a place where the water quality and taste is horrible.
You bay area folks don't know how good you have it.
It can vary a fair bit, but I agree. Some places in the PNW get river water that is great, but then there's Portland, which draws from Bull Run, and that's really some great water right there.
For cheese produced on industrial scale, we even have a good source for that -- Tillamook cheese is pretty good.
"...and then they got to talking about differences betwixt ...clear-water rivers and muddy-water ones. The man they called Ed said the muddy Mississippi water was wholesomer to drink than the clear water of the Ohio; he said if you let a pint of this yaller Mississippi water settle, you would have about a half to three- quarters of an inch of mud in the bottom, according to the stage of the river, and then it warn't no better than Ohio water - what you wanted to do was to keep it stirred up - and when the river was low, keep mud on hand to put in and thicken the water up the way it ought to be.
The Child of Calamity said that was so; he said there was nutritiousness in the mud, and a man that drunk Mississippi water could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to. He says:
"You look at the graveyards; that tells the tale. Trees won't grow worth shucks in a Cincinnati graveyard, but in a Sent Louis graveyard they grow upwards of eight hundred foot high. It's all on account of the water the people drunk before they laid up. A Cincinnati corpse don't richen a soil any."
And they talked about how Ohio water didn't like to mix with Mississippi water. Ed said if you take the Mississippi on a rise when the Ohio is low, you'll find a wide band of clear water all the way down the east side of the Mississippi for a hundred mile or more, and the minute you get out a quarter of a mile from shore and pass the line, it is all thick and yaller the rest of the way across."
Tartine's country loaf is great but its distribution is much more limited than Acme which I get at Whole Foods without a problem.
Manresa is good too. But I find something missing from them vs the other two bakeries (nitpicking here though).
Bread, milk, cheese, and butter vary a lot, depending on where you get it and how it was produced. If you're lazy and only go to a corporate, generic supermarket, you're likely to only be able to buy inferior products or marginally-good products at high prices. If you go to farmers' markets, specialty, independent, Italian grocers, and other quality stores, you will have much better choices of superior products.
Tap water in California ranges from acceptable to terrible. Sacramento and Davis are notoriously bad with very high mineral content (hardness). An ion exchange water softener is a luxury in some areas and essential in others. Also, a multi-stage carbon + RO filter is a requirement for drinking water anywhere due to chemicals including chloramines. Another common improvement is a whole-house carbon block filter to catch chloramines that can damage RO membranes and produce undesirable odors at all water use points.
Rice from California should be avoided because it contains arsenic from the soil composition. As I don't completely trust the coffeemaker rice cooking method, it's better to get rice that's safer to consume in the first place.
i.e., the corporate, generic supermarket in Europe is better than the corporate, generic supermarket in the USA.
I think this is a reasonable assertion, but there's significant regional variation between and within countries/states.
To get anything acceptable, I had to buy higher quality stuff in SF (like French bread or imported cheese).
Even specific brands will have different prices and quality, like for example the deli/produce section often has products sold by irregular weight that are better than the standardized packages elsewhere in the store.
- Milk: Straus non-homogenized organic whole milk
- Butter: Kerrygold salted
- Bread: Costco walnut raisin
Have you tried these already? They're fairly easy to find and won't cost an arm and a leg. If they're not good enough, there's fancier stuff available, such as Rodolphe Le Meunier butter, or Backhaus bakery in San Mateo which makes great pains au chocolat.
Cheese is still way behind for sure. There's too much variety and catching up will take decades. Local creameries seem mostly interested in making triple crème variations and establishing their brand. I'm sure some of them will be very successful this way, but from a consumer's perspective I don't think it will work out as well quality- and cost-wise as the French model of buying unbranded cheese from a specialized shop that hand-picks their regional suppliers.
For one, SF is NOT representative of the US. In fact, one of the best places food-wise.
However, of the five items you've listed, I'd agree with you on about 4.5. The SF's sourdough can compete with any sourdough, but an average village bakery in Europe beats it hands down on other varieties.
At least in the Northeast, the all the accumulated detritus (e.g. dog feces) from the winter gets flushed into the reservoirs in the spring, and the water districts tend to spike the chlorine levels to sterilize the higher bacterial loads.
Apart from that, in NYC, we have three main reservoir systems, each with their own cleanliness and taste. When one is being worked on, the water taste can change significantly.
Although, that has changed a little bit in the last decade or so with “foodies” and taking pictures of your food/cooking becoming a thing.
I remember being a kid, and going out to restaurants was not something we looked forward to as American restaurants were bland tasting with garlic (probably powdered crap) being the most exotic spice in the restaurant’s ingredients. Maybe it was different for richer people or in SF/NYC.
And I will never understand the appeal of a diner.
Of course, I'm biased. And from the US. But I sure like it.
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.
It's marginally cheaper than Président, (3p/100g) and marginally more expensive than Country Life (5p/100g) on Ocado. Perhaps a better benchmark - Waitrose's own essentials one is 13p/100g cheaper, and Waitrose's 'Duchy Organic' is 1p/100g more expensive. i.e. it's in the range of everyday butters that people buy the same brand of every time because that's what they buy every time (because that's what they ...).
These days I think it's not as bad, though Korea's major beer brands are still all shit.
Only 65% fish
Apparently that is the minimal amount of fish they can use and still call it Fischstäbchen
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.
Would I be having it every day? Of course not.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-10-02/how-irish...
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.
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.
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."
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.
All sentient beings should have at least one right: the right not to be treated as property.
If we took animals seriously, we would stop treating them as our resources, as our property. But that would mean an end to bringing nonhumans into existence so that we can use them for food, clothing, vivisection, or any other purpose.
It's been scientifically proven that we don't need animal products to be healthy, so humans are basically exploiting animals for no better reason than palate pleasure. And to top it off animal agriculture is having a horrific impact on the environment.
We can live without participating in the exploitation of the vulnerable.
We can live without destroying the environment.
We can live in a way that guarantees a more healthy life.
I have been cooking more with the lockdown.
I watched some cooking show on Netflix a few years ago where someone mentioned good cheese smelling like "the feet of God."
Odd thing is, when I trim my toenails these days, they do definitely have some sort of cheddar smell to them.
I guess it makes sense in a way...
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.
There ya go.
It seems like a problem that can be cracked with comparative plant tissue analysis and replicated by proper plant lighting and nutrition schedules.
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
https://www.naturli-foods.com/products/spreadable/ https://earthbalancenatural.com/spreads/original-buttery-spr... https://miyokos.com/collections/vegan-butter https://purefreefrom.co.uk/products/
Miyokos plant-based cheese is unbelievable, but still only available in the US.