The Difference Between European and American Butter

As it happens, I will be in Australia for a bit next month. This is the kind of intelligence I find invaluable. One thing I like doing as a tourist is going to grocery stores to see how locals eat. What else should I be looking for? [Insert joke about Foster's here :)]

Yes, as a (lapsed) amateur butter maker, I'd say this is the main difference between European butter and US butter, not the fat content. If you make your own butter with ordinary cream, it'll taste bland like US butter, irrespective of the fat content. You need to add a culture. Not just any culture, which you might get if you leave your cream out of the fridge long enough before starting, but one of the right cultures. Search for "cultured butter" on the interweb for further information.

As an aside, my personal view is that making your own butter doesn't provide anywhere near the same return on investment as making your own bread - home made butter takes ages, doesn't really taste that much better, and can cost more money, while home made bread doesn't take that long, and can taste a lot better.

Any other cheap corporate garbage from last century you want to sneer at? :p

Kerrygold took the gold. I keep one of the doublewide bars in this [1] butter dish on the counter. Every now and then I’ll grab a cracker and scoop off a bit. It’s so good.

1 - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WNV847W

One of the best butters I had lately is Vermont Creamery. Hands down, the flavor was just amazing. If you enjoy good butter and haven’t had this one then consider giving it a try.

Vital Farms gained lot of popularity because of their pasture raised eggs and now butter. I tried it and it is good. What scares me is that they are in the Houston area. There’s a reason why the cancer rates are high there. Unfortunately “organic” doesn’t mean product is free of crap. It only means crap was not used to make it grow. (Reason why organic psyllium from India can legally contain lead and still be organic).

> I also use Himalayan pink salt, because table salt has no nutritional value

It’s… salt. Himalayan pink salt also has no real nutritional value (it is probably lacking iodine tho), it’s just salt with inclusions of other mineral that you get in much larger quantities with regular food. Unless you literally eat large chunks of salt every day, I guess.

Pink salt is a fad/marketing thing, exactly as margarine was…

And you know why your average American turns into an unhealthy tub of lard ?

Simple really:

     1) Americans have a penchant for over-processed foods which in turn contain high-levels of "the wrong" fats and, of course, sugar (which in America is generally the horrible processed type, e.g. corn syrup) .
     2) American portion sizes for one meal could feed an entire African family for a week, American portions are obscene
     3) Americans are largely sedentary, and have a penchant for driving instead of walking
     4) Americans have a penchant for intensive industrial farming which reduces the quality of the raw ingredient
     

It's not rocket science.

Eat Less. Eat Better. Do Some Exercise. Your body will thank you.

This is BS. I'm French, born and raised and we are plenty fat / unhealthy here.

I'm in my first week of the McDougall diet because I'm fat. That's the so called French diet that made me that way (for reference I ate fast food only 3 times since 2020, so junk food isn't responsible for my weight).

There is no magic, you can't feast like a king everyday and stay healthy. Slim people here either don't feast everyday (they have a self control I don't have) or are doing a lot of sport (or both).

Butter is a key component of a quintessential American sandwich - the grilled cheese. Also, bread and butter is a midwestern dinner table staple, and buttered crackers are things I snack on, I put them out for dinner parties. Though, older people use margarine for "health reasons".

If I want tanginess on a sandwich, I reach for mustard.

On sandwiches we use mayonnaise since the sandwich is cold, and the eggy flavor of mayo is really tasty, and cold mayo is easy to spread but cold butter is not -- if you used regular sandwich bread it would most likely tear.

Plain room-temp bread and butter we don't eat much of, but that's because sandwich bread isn't usually very good by itself, not because of the quality of the butter.

I think the butter-with-hot-food thing might also be because we usually keep butter in the fridge. I'm aware some people keep butter at room temperature so it's spreadable, but that's never been popular in the US.

Who takes three weeks to go through a stick of butter???

Where I am from they butter every visible piece of bread but you will be hard pressed to find a single household where butter is not kept in the fridge. In fact, I'd argue that the only country that keeps butter at the room temp seems to be the UK.

You want room-temperature butter so it's spreadable. Ripped bread and dry toast are awful, and nobody says "I'll take one portion of butter out of the fridge so I can have toast in 30 minutes from now".

Salted butter will survive being left at room temperature longer than unsalted butter, because the salt helps inhibit bacterial growth. Once you've thrown away your third half-eaten pack of unsalted butter because it's gone rancid before you could finish it, you get the picture.

Even in the fridge, salted butter lives longer than unsalted. So why ever buy unsalted? Because in baking, salt kills your yeast. Even if yeast isn't involved, you usually don't want salty cakes, muffins, pastry, etc.

Hence unsalted butter in the fridge for baking while salted butter for eating on the counter-top.

The USDA regulates the appearance and flavor of butter. They employ a bunch of professional butter tasters for this purpose. Perhaps something similar is going on with the smell.

I was pretty shocked when I looked up the standards for butter grading and learned that they don't serve any safety-related purpose. How do I conceivably derive any benefit from a label that says "in the opinion of the United States government, this butter is more visually appealing than other similar butters"?

It involves baking heavy cream at a low temp in the oven for 12 hours, then chilling it and scooping up the dense layer on top. Tastes absolutely marvelous.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/257734/chef-johns-clotted-...

Apparently it's really a local thing because I have never been able to find butter with salt crystals from anywhere else, to my dismay since I haven't lived there for a long time (but I'm close enough to France that I can still get my butter there).

Great article btw that explained why butter in the US was so tasteless when I tried it. (Btw, butter I tried in Italy or Spain has the same problems)

AKA proper butter.

try a bordier butter and come back telling me kerrygold is better.

If the only other option was store brand supermarket butter, I would choose Kerrygold, but not when there is a local alternative.

To avoid this I buy normal butter.

So, 88% + 50% = 'the equation'. Would this be where we get those fascinating units of measure such as 'the tipple', etc?

Irish cows live outside and are fed on grass (what a concept!), and the difference in taste, texture, color and ethics is too large to ignore.

Of course they never taste the same, as they were made with milk not produced in greece, and without the generations of tradition and knowledge. Hence why the PDO makes perfect sense.

In the US they sell sawdust and call it parmigiano. This is a disgrace.

I'm sorry but that is not right. I'm Greek and I make cheese, although feta is not my specialty. Feta can last for weeks in the refrigerator, and it can be aged for a year or more before it is sent to market. Perhaps you are thinking of a different Greek cheese? There are some varieties of anthotyro (a whey cheese, made as a byproduct of making feta and other Greek cheeses) that do not last very long. But, the general rule is that with modern refrigeration technology most cheese, from most countries, can travel around Europe without trouble.

"Fresh" feta is also a bit of a misconception. Traditionally, feta is aged in wooden barrels, in 18 degrees Celsius. In modern days, market forces limit the aging period to the absolute minimum of three months, but you can still find plenty of traditional producers who age their feta for a lot longer. When we're talking about cheese, "fresh" refers more to the taste and organoleptic characteristics of the product, rather than how soon it is consumed after production. So three-month old feta cheese will often be referred to as "fresh" even if it's ... three months old.

In my understanding, what really blocked "access to feta cheese to all of Europe" was, for a long time, the production of cheese called "feta" by French, German and Danish companies, who made "feta" with cheap, industrially bred cow's milk, until the PDO for Greek feta was established. Those inferior "feta" cheeses confused European consumers, for whom after all feta is not a tradition and they can't be expected to know what feta is supposed to be like, and contrived to keep the real stuff out of the European market.

Of course, if you ask me, the kind of fully PDO feta that can be found in most European markets today is not much better than the cow's milk "feta" made by those non-Greek producers, even if it's made in Greece and while (nominally) respecting the PDO regulations, but that's another, and vary painful discussion. Suffice it to say that adulteration of milk for feta with cow's milk bought in the cheap from other Balkan countries is a thing.

I do the same but generalize a little and have: 2/3 cup red wine vinegar. 2 cups olive oil. 1/3 cup Dijon mustard (adds flavor and keeps the oil and vinegar from separating, i.e., acts like an emulsifier). 1 T (tablespoon) minced garlic. 1 T Worcestershire sauce. 1/4 cup bottled, minced, dried Parsley. Some salt and pepper.

Uh, for the red wine vinegar and olive oil, I just buy the cheapest, in ~1 gallon jugs.

I don't bother to refrigerate it.

1.5 t (teaspoon) on toast is good!

Right, it's vinegar/oil ratio 1/3, traditional.

Right, some French cooking sources would say it's a version of Sauce Vinaigrette.

And as I recall from an old story about California, might add crushed anchovies and an egg and serve it over Romaine lettuce with Parmesan cheese and toast cubes (croutons with the vinaigrette). Artichoke hearts are another possible addition.

The country of origin regulations would apply though - does it say very openly "made in Germany" on the packet? If not then it would likely fall foul of those rules.

Try some butter on toast if it's been that long! I'm sure you'll enjoy it to some degree :-)

Once, in Italy, my family was served a straight up chunk of lamb fat. My dad took one for the team and gulped it. I was grateful at the time, but later in life I discovered pork shoulder, with its drippy cracklin... and now I wish I could go back to that little albergo and try their lamb fat.