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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

As a French guy, I like the "grater" knife, I may even buy one, but the "right angle" one feels weird.

But I may have an alternative explanation. The article talks about order and Japanese sensibilities, but to me, a right angle cut in a butter slab doesn't look particularly pleasing.

Instead, what I think it is to make precise cuts easier when the butter is hard, for example if it came out of the fridge. In this case, it can require a significant amount of force to cut through the slab, and making a straight cut can be difficult. With the tool, you push straight down, so you can use more force. And the right angle shape stabilizes the blade during the cut.

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A French girl once asked me, "Why is there no salt in your Norwegian butter?" This really got to me. It forced me to ask existential questions like, "Should there really be salt in butter?" But the fact is, putting salt in stuff is an old conservation method. Because of it, unsalted butter was looked upon as fresher, and thus of higher value when used as spread or in cooking. As far as I know, the idea of unsalted butter was actually popularized by French gourmands! But as newer and cleaner dairy production methods came about, the production of unsalted butter became more common. On top of that, the colder climate in Scandinavia means that unsalted butter keeps for longer than in warmer countries. So that's why Norwegian butter isn't salted. But yeah, as for the "grater knife;" I think it just made it to the top of my wish-list for Christmas!

But Norwegian butter is salted. It's just that you can also buy unsalted butter (and extra-salted butter, lactose-free butter (only sold in smaller 250g sizes while "normal" butter is also sold at 500g), and butter from sour cream. And a couple more. The salted variant is the "normal" butter (center in the picture in the link), the rest are variants. https://www.tine.no/merkevarer/tine-sm%C3%B8r/produkter/tine...

Salted butter is mostly used in the Brittany region of France, there's a joke that goes: "How can you tell a girl from Brittany likes anal? > She has unsalted butter in her fridge."

Bit vulgar but culturally interesting I thought.

It's originally from Brittany, but salted butter is very popular in all of France.

Ummm yyyeeah. I see what you did there :)

This is really interesting because here in Sweden pretty much everyone uses salted butter, you can buy unsalted but it’s not common at all.

The most popular sandwich spread (bregott, a mix of butter and rapeseed oil) comes in three main variants: “normally” salted, lightly salted, and extra salted.

Yes! In Sweden nobody puts actual butter on bread, we have loads of different butter-based "spreads" for that. Bregott (literally "spread good/well/tasty") is probably the most common and engineered to be spreadable straight from the fridge.

Proper butter is for cooking but primarily for baking.

I am 45, have been interested in cooking for 20+ years, read many cookbooks and so on. I learned about butter dishes and the idea of having butter out on the counter to make it spreadable from the internet. I dare say that practice does not happen here.

It does happen; I've met a few older Swedes that used actual butter, but nowadays most people seem to be eating Lätta or Bregott. The situation's the same here in Finland -- butter on bread is mostly an old people thing and most people just buy the local equivalent of Bregott.

I lived in the states for a while and missed Bregott. "Land o Lakes butter with canola oil" is a pretty good substitute.

In Denmark most of the butter is salted and the Danish are definitely a butter nation. I'm wondering how nobody tried to introduce some of this "japanese butter tools" to Denmark. There might be a business case here.

Probably because we eat lots of Kærgården[0] and other mixed butter products. Which inicdentally is easier to spread, and melts at lower temperatures.

[0] Butter mixed with vegetable oil and stabilized.

I know, but wouldn't it be nicer if you could get a nice slice of pure butter like Lurpak without much hassle ;)

Kerrygold in Germany is sold in the standard gold wrapper but unsalted. I was really surprised having come from the UK where it's salted and utterly delicious. If you want the salted stuff you have to hunt for silver labels, and I have only started to find these recently and only then in the biggest supermarkets.

Butter preferences around the world are strange.

Interesting. Here, in the US the gold wrapper is salted while the silver wrapper is unsalted

There is also salted Kerrygold in Germany. But I think the wrapper is silver.

I said that already in my post :-)

Italian here, from a quite warmer country.

There shouldn't be any salt in your butter.

There is no salt in milk, there is no salt in butter.

Unless you want salted butter, in that case you can simply buy a slab of salted butter.

I really enjoy the way Italians are so normative about their food.

Yes, this is what everyone else is talking about, salted butter.

In the US, salted butter and unsalted butter are both sold in stores. In general, you eat the salted butter directly, and you might use either salted or unsalted butter in cooking.

The only reason we use unsalted butter is if a recipe specifically calls for it. But it's widely available.

I've heard that unsalted butter makes it easier to measure the salt to put in a recipe, since you don't need to reverse engineer the salt content of the butter. But in practice I don't find this very compelling because (in my experience) the salt is pretty standardized. I generally convert my own recipes back to using purely salted butter so I don't have to stock two kinds of butter.

We use only unsalted butter to reduce sodium - everything else already has to much salt in it.

I almost always cook with unsalted butter (unless all I have is salted, or it's a recipe I'm familiar with and comfortable with salted butter in) because it provides more freedom to control salt-fat combinations, and salt levels are one of the things I am most likely to find wrong (in either direction) with unfamiliar recipes.

I occasionally also use sold-as-unsalted butter in directly-served applications, because it lets you play with different finishing salts instead of just getting it mixed in with the butter.

When you say eat directly, do you mean as a spread?

Yes. I would not eat a stick of butter in the same way that I wouldn't drink a glass of oil.

Wait. What? The first time I learned that there is salted butter was in scandinavia, and now you are telling me you dont do that anymore? Admittedly it was a long time ago in what feels far away..

Salted butter is more common in Western France and Brittany in particular. Brittany has been a large salt producer for centuries and as such used to be exempt from the salt tax (gabelle).

I'm almost certain that salt was never added to butter as a preservative and your "cleaner" method theory is unsound: there is nothing about churning that would accidentally introduce salt. Salted butter is probably best thought of as a subset of compound butters.

Salted butter was a popular spread in restaurants and consumers wanted it in their homes.

I don't want to get between a Frenchman and his butter, but I just use a potato peeler for cold butter. I find it works well enough. I've also used a cheese slicer, but I found it harder to control the thickness.

I second this.

Or simply use a regular knife, either the teeth or the back, depending on the type of cut you want, to scrape the slab's surface.

I love Japanese strive for perfection and their tools, but I feel butter cutting is a solved problem.

Scraping it off the slab works well enough but then spreading cold butter on a slice of bread still sucks.

The secret is warming the bread or the knife's blade.

We don't cut our butter, but instead use a regular knife to scrape[1] curls off the top for spreading. (changing sides every now and then so the top of the butter winds up with a dihedral "roof" shape) Depending upon temperature of the butter, one has to use different speeds and feeds, but the correct ones for easily spreadable curls come quickly with practice.

[1] other scraping folk arts: hand-carved toy "christmas trees" with wood curls (originally, I think, suitable for use as tinder. These days we use chemical blocks as starters) and raclette, a dish involving scraping molten blobs off a wheel of cheese.

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