Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

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

Clover came in dead last by far, even though it's generally considered a respectable northern California butter. More surprisingly, neither my wife nor I liked Bordier much at all (and it was difficult to find — we ended up locating small samples of it at ONE65 in SF). It definitely had the most unique flavor and color of the batch, although I can't say it was one that I found very pleasing. I'm almost wondering if I got a bad batch since everyone raves about it so much. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get ahold of Diane St. Clair's butter to test, although I would love to try it at some point.

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.

I did a web search for "Échiré". First result was an Amazon product page at $25, second result was a gourmet food store at $8 for the same thing.

both results were for 250g (half pound) of demi sel

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.

I've never associated fishy with kerrygold, but after reading this thread a bit, I think I may have thrown out clover butter mistakingly assuming it had gone rancid. It either picks up fishy flavors very easily or develops them quickly in the fridge while other butters are just fine.

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 read once that the cows are grass fed

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?

Same in New Zealand. Pretentious restaurants print "grass fed beef" on the menu. I don't know if there are any non-grass fed cows in the entire country.

Unfortunately, Israel perfected milk yield a few decades ago; at the time, Israel was something like 10 times the world average, now it’s less than five but mostly because other big producers like Denmark adopted Israeli knowledge, and the world average went up.

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.

Question is, given this thread is somewhat focused on the "premium" niche, which country has "perfected" dairy at a broader agricultural level (rather than the focus here on individual company/brand level)

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.

I don't know about perfection, but as an American coming from a not-particularly-dairy-country state yet loving milk and cheese, Great Britain and Ireland delighted me. When I lived there I was pleasantly surprised just how good commodity milk and cheese was, not to mention specialty sources.

And at the same time how sad most of the meat was relative to US standards.

May I ask what is in the feed for optimized milk production?

I believe the term is "corn finished".

Similarly: Iberico ham -- the pigs are fed acorns several months before slaughter.

I love the grassy flavor of grass-fed beef. This makes me wonder if you can do the opposite and raise the cattle on corn then finish them with grass before slaughter to get that nice mineral flavor.

It isn't 'unusual' as in strange or objectionable. The mental picture is still of grazing cows. But a diet of corn is cheap and increases the fat content of the meat, so exclusively grassfed must be sought out.

Kerrygold is my top choice, but only because it's the best tasting of the grass fed butter in my area. However, there are non-grass fed butters that taste better. I use Kerrygold when a recipe calls for a lot of butter, but when I'm putting small amounts on bread, etc., I prefer the non-grass fed options.

I always buy Kerrygold because I find that it spreads better, which is very important for an Englishman.

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.

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