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Comment by sctgrhm | Hacker News Reader

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 ;-)

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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.

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.

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.

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