One of France's oldest butter producers makes 380 tons per year [video] | Hacker News Reader

One of France's oldest butter producers makes 380 tons per year [video]

youtube.com

193 pointszdw87 comments

Claudia Romeo from Food Insider interviewed the super enthusiastic owner of this place. https://youtu.be/ZyXUzhTn0kI

This is a much better watch, and features Jean-Yves Bordier before he retired.

Wow, what a treat! I'm glad I watched this one too. I'm reminded of 'The Logical Song' by Supertramp. They never got to him and I'm glad to see it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=low6Coqrw9Y

Wow, how can you not fall in love with people like that! I have so much admiration for people that can be so passionate about their work and what they produce, but at the same time they never see it as just chemistry or a production process, but an art form and their gift to humanity.

I just want to dip a spoon in at every step and sample it.

About two years ago I bought just about every butter at the local grocery and started sampling them. (COVID hobby i guess) and it completely changed my relationship with butter. I found a few that were clear favorites...to the point where one of them I can slice off a thin pat and just eat it neat.

Butter in the abstract is loved, but somehow it has been relegated to commodity status (at least around here). It's fun digging into it and realizing there's a whole landscape out there.

Could you share the fruits of your labor with us?

I can't really because the actual fruit of my labor is the enrichment of my understanding of butter. It's 100% worth it, I spent maybe $60 on ~10 lbs of butter and it was all used up within a month or two.

One other thing I've started to do is leave some butter out all of the time. My grandma used to do this and nobody ever got sick from it. But the butter gets soooo soft and unctuous. Those French butter bell things are a pita, I just use a regular butter dish with a lid.

Would you mind sharing which brands were your favorites?

This really brings back memories of my childhood. I grew up on a small family farm, and all of our butter came from the cream from our own cows. Not only are there huge differences between kinds of butter, there are also huge seasonal differences between the milk produced by cows, and hence, the butter. When dandelions are in bloom, it's going to be yellower and more fragrant, and definitely more sour when the sorrel is sprouting. It was always a surprise what you'd get, even when using the same process.

I remember when I first learned that butter is more than "just butter". In my case I was at the local import shop and the guy working the cheese counter offered me a sample of some cheese he was recommending. I said "oh that would be good on a slice of bread with some butter and a bit of thyme". His response was "of course, but which butter?", and proceeded to walk me through a rapid crash course in butters with samples. I remember it well because we ended up with a group we called "butter club" - a group of foodies that took turns hosting dinners and all recruited by the question "of course, but what type of butter?"

Such a fun little slice of "the world is a big place".

And notice too that your butter changes in flavor, even color, throughout the year. It remains one of the few products that hasnt been rigidly commodified.

Buttergate. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56175784

I don't know if it's the same but I rediscovered a few raw veggies taste. Lettuce is sparkling but it's o so subtle. Servings and sauces hide all that behind a lot of ecstatic sensations but you forget the original taste. Butter too.

Raw cabbage is amazing. It’s bright and crispy/crunchy and sweet and just a little spicy.

yesss I love Bordier, showed this to my partner recently to explain to her why I love nice imported French butters. Traveling there really made me fall in love with French food and the mentality behind a lot of it.

Part of what Europe does right is its legal certification process for traditionally made foods, "protected designation of origin" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_designation_of_origi...). At nicer import stores you can find San Marzano tomatoes with a DOP stamp, so you know it's the real deal. In America we've had a few decades of a race to the bottom, where quality slowly declined in order to generate more profits, until what we have now is unrecognizable from what it originally was.

Yeah the food situation in the US is pretty sad. I rmb going there in an exchange and the family dad beeming with pride "look I bought you a French baguette", and suffice to say... it was neither French nor a baguette lol. It barely qualified as food for animals.

I live in a US city with a population over 2,000,000 that's seemingly incapable of producing what would be a very mediocre loaf of bread in Paris, for under $12. Actually-good bread simply cannot be had—there isn't any. One consequence of this is that it's impossible to get a decent sandwich here for anything but crazy-high prices.

And don't get me started on the croissant situation. Ugh. They're all too-big and disgustingly doughy (90% of them are in this category), or burnt.

I have no idea why this is the case, but it is. Like I know baguettes are price controlled so you can't compare those, but I mean any bread at all that's decent and somewhat affordable—simply not a thing here. You'd think someone could do it, but evidently not.

I mean, it’s the same reason you can’t find a great mission burrito in Paris. Every city has its own food culture.

So you're suggesting that a main feature of US food culture is shit bread?

> So you’re suggesting that a main feature of US food culture is shit bread?

I don’t know if GP was suggesting it, but it absolutely unironically is. At least from the perspective of anyone who thinks of bread as a standalone element; bread as a neutral canvas for other elements is fairly central to, at least, many of the distinct American food cultures.

Sure, but then you can take exactly the same ingredients but swap out the bad bread for an artisanal bread and the result will taste much better.

> Sure, but then you can take exactly the same ingredients but swap out the bad bread for an artisanal bread and the result will taste much better.

“Better” is subjective and shaped by experience and cultutal expectations, among other factors; for a set of food preferences that are fairly common in the USA, no, it won’t, which is why it is hard to find “good” bread (which is not particularly more expensive to make) on the market in the USA, and why what little their is commands a high price; people to whom it makes a positive difference are rare, and disproportiinately price insensitive.

I mean, I'm not complaining that our foie gras is lacking, or our sushi's not very good. Bread's pretty important across a lot of cuisines and my city's bizarrely terrible at it, for some reason. Zero places here make really good bread, and the few that achieve "OK" charge so much one hesitates to eat it, rather than preserving it in a display case to impress guests.

What do you expect from a country that came up with the saying "best thing since sliced bread", when sliced bread is the worst :)

You can also get decent sliced bread (it's a regular loaf sliced at the time of purchase rather coming pre-sliced).

I am a fellow USian, who is haunted by the first good baguette they had. Paris, December 2012. Only half of the loaf made it to the hostel. I still vividly remember how it felt to tear that first piece off of it, the delicacy of the crust, the crumb, the warmth and aroma. I remember it better than the first time I had sex, not a joke.

Alan Bourdain writing about a bread maker he knew: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29077398

It's been 35 years since the price of baguette is no more regulated in France.

Perhaps my French-born French professor had outdated information :-) I did find the prices to be notably low and identical everywhere when I visited, but maybe that's more a kind of cultural habit or expectation, than law, these days.

I have been to the USA only twice, to San Francisco and to New York, and the absence of flavour and substance in the food is what really stuck with me. Everything was so bland and generic and non filling. The two only exceptions were a cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory, and a chowder in some small fish shop. And the latter only because I never had it before.

I can really imagine all portions being over sized and saturated with fat and sugar in an attempt to (over) compensate with all its consequences.

And yes, proper fresh French baguette is worth a meal on its own.

It’s something that I and almost every immigrant I know struggles with. I moved to the US when I was a small child but even I’ve got tons of memories of what tomatoes and blueberries are supposed to taste like. Every household in my extended family grows a lot of their own food and I’m in the process of building out a green house around my existing hydroponics setup to extend the growing season to all year. For next year we’re debating buying a whole cow from a local rancher to split amongst the family so we can have some semblance of control over how the meat is grown.

I feel especially bad for those who immigrate from tropical countries like Costa Rica. The quality and variety of fruit there is completely insane compared to the bland trash we have in the US.

Unfortunately even in France quite often a French baguette isn't so 'proper', but when it is mmmmh.

I think I'll never forget the croissant I ate around San Francisco, I had never seen such a big croissant! When you think about the amount of butter there is already in a normal croissant.. This one had probably enough calories for half a day.

> And yes, proper fresh French baguette is worth a meal on its own.

Almost. Just add wine and cheese :)

And saucisson!

and foie gras!

Indeed.

> San Francisco and to New York, and the absence of flavour and substance in the food is what really stuck with me

What? Where did you eat?

> The two only exceptions were a cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory

I guess we have different definitions of substance and flavour. I can't imagine anything being more boring than Cheesecake Factory.

> What? Where did you eat?

My experience is that no fuss food can be fantastic (I have really fond memories of things like hot dogs, pastrami sandwiches, breakfast burritos, and cheesesteak sandwiches) but fancy restaurants were mostly disappointments. Following tourist trails in an American city I definitely can see how someone could not come anywhere near anything tasty.

> I guess we have different definitions of substance and flavour. I can't imagine anything being more boring than Cheesecake Factory.

It’s the exotic factor. If you’ve never really had a real cheesecake, it is a novel experience. Once was enough, but I enjoyed it.

I live in Montreal (a city with a large French influence) and am regularly in France, and there is no comparison between the bread or butter we get in Montreal vs what is available everywhere in France. If you look you can find decent bread - Montreal has the best overall bakery scene I'm aware of outside France. I haven't found good butter yet.

Butter in produced in north america seems to be mostly pretty bad. I think it has a lot to do with how milk is marketed, low price is everything. So the dairies are dominated by volume-over-quality, a ton of holstiens and whatever cheapest feed can be found. Starting from there doesn't lead anywhere good, for butter or cheese.

A friend who lived there (Montreal, or maybe it was when they were in Ottawa?) told me the import duty on European butter was 300%. So you can get some good imports, but super expensive. And the local "artisinal" stuff is mostly not as good as even KerryGold but also stupid expensive, because they only compete with those imports.

If it helps, it’s more or less the same in London: I haven’t found a decent baguette in years (though they have some decent croissants, only quite expensive). They have a not-quite baguettes which are serviceable in sandwiches, and some kind of larger loaves that looks like actual bread except that it tends not to have any crust, only the external appearance of it.

But nothing close to an actual baguette, which is something stupidly easy and cheap to make. And stupidly delicious, it goes wonderfully with marmelade and good butter, which is quite easy to find in the UK. Better than crackers with a lot of cheeses, as well.

> You'd think someone could do it, but evidently not.

I think the main things with baguettes is that they are not as sweet as common English “bread”, and for some reason some people seem to hate crust or any kind of texture. Also, you cannot keep them fresh for more than a day. Keeping a supply requires going to a bakery every other day, which in turns requires the presence of a bakery within a couple of minutes walk from home. This is just not a thing in the UK, or the US from my more limited experience.

How do you not get depressed being surrounded by all these unsophisticated rabble?

while I'm a big supporter of EU PDO labels they are not perfect, they (generally) do not guarantee quality, and they have the negative effect of "crystallizing" something, which is a bit sad and paradoxical. Still, better than nothing.

| crystallizing

can you please explain what you mean by this?

They probably mean that the certification requires very rigid processes which means any variation would not get the stamp of approval so innovation and experimentation is discouraged.

There are plenty of examples where the young renegades veered off and produced their own products in an AOC or DOC region. It just means the onus of marketing is upon themselves.

It just makes more sense to create a brand that binds hundreds of producers together by standards. Everyone on average is better off.

Once you get a product, like Camembert, or a wine like Burgundy, with a big AOP apparatus around it, there is little room for experimentation. In Burgundy you can't plant anything except Chardonnay for white wine that's going to be labeled Burgundy. Someone has an idea that sauvignon blanc might do well in a famous vineyard? Too bad, instead of Grand Cru Burgundy you're going to have to sell it as generic "Vin de France", which is typically box wine.

If anyone hasn't tried AOP French butter, it is really wonderful. The cows are pastured or fed forage, no grain, so it has a lot of flavor. There's a reason the French enjoy tartines and "beurre jambon" (sandwiches with preserves and ham, respectively), with good bread and butter it's a revelation. Bordier is rightly famous but any, e.g., Beurre d'Isigny is going to be worlds above 99% of butters made in the US.

>Bordier is rightly famous

Oh, the smoked butter (sel fumé) from a small specialist farm in Bretagne.. stuff of dreams.

Beurre fumé or sel fumé? (Is the salted butter itself smoked, or is it butter made with smoked salt?)

I believe it's sel fumé: salted butter, using smoked salt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoked_salt

If you like Isigny butter, try Isigny cream ;) It's hard to find better crème fraîche.

PDO has minimum requirements. Some producers will do their best to barely fullfil those in order to sel PDO as cheap as possible while others will go above and beyond those requirements. The consumers still need to do some researches in order to get the best possible but the label should at least ensure you're getting something somewhat ok.

Where do you buy this imported butter in America?! I must know.

Small specialty international stores, where everything is stupidly expensive but also stupidly delicious.

> At nicer import stores you can find San Marzano tomatoes with a DOP stamp

I can get these at Costco

I think in some regions they're a lot more common than others – in Connecticut they're found in almost every grocery store, but states/cities without an outsize Italian-American presence one might have to run around town.

For many products, Costco is legitimately a nice import store!

Ah ! I live within 20km of their factory. I would not have expected this on HN.

Their butter is, indeed, very good. I always get one of the first spring butter, when the cows get the fresh grass. Creamy and absolutely delicious !

"we do everything by hand"

... proceeds to demonstrate large churning machine (:

No, I know they're doing a much more manual process than most such factories. I think even the Amish use automation for churning.

For reference though, 380 tons is actually a smallish number. Seems France produces about 1000x that much in total, per year, not to mention other countries.

I was thinking the same thing. It’s a bit over a ton a day, which is 250 gallons of milk (well, probably a bit more assuming that it takes more than a pound of milk to make a pound of butter). Kind of like the scene in the first Austin Powers movie where Doctor Evil demands ONE MILLION DOLLARS! and the world leaders laugh.

It takes over a pound of cream to make a pound of butter.

Whole milk -> skim milk + cream Cream -> buttermilk + butter

Some quick googling said half a gallon of milk yields half a cup of butter so figure it’s 16:1 whole milk to butter, so that’s 4,000 gallons of milk not 250. A cow can produce 8 gallons of milk a day so we need 250 cows to support this butter production. The Google says 60–80 dairy cows to make a living so figure this represents three or four small dairy farms to support that production level.

> 380 tons is actually a smallish number

Um, did anyone think any different??

By hand usually means using machinery to do something the traditional way. People can do very little without machines.

The difference is that it’s not a mass production process that usually requires special chemicals and treatments to keep the ingredients in certain state to run high speed high yield process.

It’s like the hand made toys that are actually made using power tools, knives, hammers etc.

as long as you don’t alter the process but just get help from machines to speed up things or increase yields, it’s handmade.

If you're in the South Bay and maybe SF, the Frenchery imports and distributes the butter from Bordier. It is very, very good.

Very fun to see this here ! I've been to Bordier's shop in St Malo, they do make lovely butter. If you know a bit about France and Brittany, you'll know that "les bretons" are very much fond of their butter. Check out how they make the famous kouign amann and if you get a chance, do have a taste if the quantities of sugar and butter don't put you off ;-)

In the bay area, mademoiselle Colette has amazing kouign-amann!

They use beurre d'Isigny too.

I was surprised to discover that several cafés in Berkeley carry kouign-Amann!

Before I moved away three years ago, I used to get kouign-amann at Peet's coffee stores outside the immediate Bay Area. I don't know what the situation is now.

Even as a "Normand", I have to agree that this indeed lovely butter ;)

To give a bit of context, Bordier is considered very high-end/premium butter that you find mostly at cheesemongers (the large ones you see in the video, they get cut on demand) and Michelin star restaurants (the small cones for example). It's not particularly cheap, but unless you have a local small farm around (doing it the old way, which is probably not much of a thing), it's about as good as butter can get.

I stumbled upon that video a few days ago and was a bit surprised that even their "standardised" products (the "plaquettes", aka the rectangles you'll see around the end with striations on them) were still shaped manually.

Btw, is salted butter a Brittany thing ? Here in my local epicerie in Paris suburb, can only find "Demi-sel" :(

The three basic butters would be "doux" (unsalted), "demi-sel" and "salé" although the latter does seem to be harder to find in your run-of-the-mill markets and epiceries outside of Brittany.

Wow, amazing they still use the butter paddles to shape and mold the butter manually.

There is a great series on YouTube about a Victorian-era cook in an aristocratic house, they had an episode on butter, https://youtu.be/DV7hop4m0YQ , and the paddles and molding process looked exactly the same as the beginning of this video.

They're using the paddles mostly for the look of the end product, judging from the patting machine processing shown at the beginning of the video.

In Elaine Khosrova's book, "Butter: A Rich History", IIRC she claims that there is a difference in consistency when wooden paddle handling and shaping is used exclusively after the churning stage. That's not really what they're doing here; they're just giving the look of it having been done. Understandable though if they're producing so much.

If any of you are passing by St Malo (France) the owner has a small restaurant called "Le bistrot autour du beurre" that is excellent for its price.

My advice if you also want to buy some butter: unsalted is excellent but it won't taste good for long (pretty much like a fresh baguette). Salted butter has a much longer duration, if you plan to take some home.

Nice to see someone so in love and dedicated to a single product.

Meanwhile there's a cream shortage here on the east coast US! The price of cream has gone up substantially and was entirely unavailable during Thanksgiving weekend in my local area. No heavy or light cream whatsoever at any store. And now it's 2.5x the price it usually is.

It’s amazing how local diary still is for many things.

During covid my parents could barely get milk and meanwhile we were drowning in it.

Even worse - dairy farms here had to dump milk due to overproduction because there wasn't enough capacity for milk processing to turn into cream and other products. Something is really broken in dairy supply chain and the production lines here. Cream is still not available in our region and hasn't been for months.

Some crazy stuff in this article by an Ag producer: https://agmoos.com/2021/12/10/supply-and-demand-are-the-real...

And competition between cheese, cream, ice cream makers for tight milk availability: https://nypost.com/2022/10/03/heres-why-the-us-is-facing-a-b...

Yeah, and I'm not sure all of those things can be effectively shipped very far (perhaps cheese and ice cream).

Around here milk is a bit higher than before, but there's no shortages of anything cow related.

> It’s amazing how local diary still is for many things.

It's not really surprising, it doesn't ship well or age well (at least, not as liquid). You can do things like UHT but it negatively affects quality and makes it useless for a lot of things.

These are the links that make me glad that I still visit this site regularly.

I especially like how they rotate roles between staff. For manual, repetitive work, this is a nice idea to reduce boredom and improve everyone's day, IMO.

Eater has been releasing some incredible food-related mini-documentaries! This one is great, too. Gotta get my hands on some of this butter

That's like what? $2-3 million worth of butter?

Doesn't seem like much for a factory right?

That stuff is delicious.

Why are there many post about France on HN?

Why are there many posts about the US on HN?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com