I'm surprised culturing is reduced to a single throwaway line, since it makes a huge difference in flavor: some of the heavily cultured butter brands out there are closer to cheese. If you're ever in Australia, try Pepe Saya on fresh sourdough!
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.
Brit here; British supermarket butter isn't cultured. Most French butter isn't cultured either. Characterising european butter as cultured butter is misleading.
There is a good book called "Make the Bread, Buy the Butter" which covers what foods give the best return on time, effort, and money invested.
But philosophically, it makes a lot of sense generally. You're not going to make everything from scratch or near-scratch so it makes sense to focus on the stuff you can't readily buy or which you genuinely enjoy the making process.
I now appreciate that Lurpak is marked as 'lightly salted', which makes all the difference.
Thank you for a lifetime's dutiful service, Danish Milk Cooperative :)
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 :)]
- Marmite. Not too much, just a light spread. Try it with eggs. - Eta Munchos, spicy tomato flavour (NZ based, but you may find them) - a pie from a bakery - tim tams - whitaker's chocolate - anzac biscuits
Before I had an interest in researching a healthy diet I made poor dietary choices. I don't think the good choices are always immediately obvious. I also spent about 3x my normal time in the supermarket when I first started eating healthy. If you live somewhere with few grocery options you may have to drive pretty far. When I was a kid we commuted 40-50 miles (1hr drive) to go to a better, cheaper grocery store.
But to your original point, yeah, there are a ton of bread choices in a typical supermarket and, with few exceptions, I never buy the plastic-wrapped from the major manufacturers and buy something made in-house or otherwise locally or one of the "craft" breads from some other local company.
(The price difference isn't even that huge. It looks like a loaf of Wonder bread (stereotypical American white bread) at my local supermarket is $3.50 while better breads aren't necessarily more than $5--which isn't nothing for someone pinching pennies but isn't a huge premium either.
(Also, most grocery stores here do not sell alcohol — you go to the 'bottle shop' for booze. Legal drinking age is 18.)
Don't get me wrong, you can get great coffee in Australia and they do genuinely care about it. But you can't get better coffee than you'll get by visiting a "third-wave" specialty coffee shop in any big city around the world. What you will get is a stronger helping of "our coffee is better than everyone else's" served alongside your cup. For a real sneer, if you dare, go into Melbourne coffee shop and order an Americano instead of a long black. Or maybe you'll get lucky and meet less condescending baristas there than I did. I certainly hope so.
Well put and extensively documented in this short but worthwhile snapshot:
We've opened the edgiest most exclusive cafe in the whole world - and it's always closed...
Welcome to The Closed Cafe. [1]
Aunty Donnas has a whole range of Melbourne cafe sketches too
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ChB2gn6rE4s
This one's my favorite
That's stupid, it might be impressive they know the difference, but what if I actually wanted an Americano? (Hot water added, vs espresso pulled into it in a long black.)
I'm not so snobbish as to care (and I prefer lungo anyway - long shot all brewed, no pure water added) it just seems to me if they're going to be like that then they should recognise they're different and offer both. 'Certainly sir, or if you prefer we can do a long black too' sort of thing, acknowledging that the customer may be just as snobbish/knowledgeable, but accustomed to ordering Americano because 'long black' would generally furrow eyebrows.
I do think in hindsight I may have experienced it though, in the UK - I didn't order, but my aunt or someone was told they don't do Americanos and came back with a filter coffee or something. At the time I thought they were just incompetent ('do you do espressos? Hot water?' I would have not been able to resist retorting) but now I think probably it was similar to your experience. Stupid.
Yup, your aunt got a dose of coffee snobbishness I'm afraid. The worst I've experienced recently was when several of us went into a specialty coffee shop that I'd been recommended in Saigon. All except for one ordered ordered coffee. My last friend can't handle anything with caffeine so she asked what other drinks were on the menu. There were none, no non-coffee drinks and no decaf either. Eventually we asked what the ~5 year old child on the table beside us was drinking. Babychino (foamed milk). Great, it's not on the menu but she'll have one.
They charged us $6 for the babychino, or more even (180k VND I think). When we complained they pointed out the tiny print on the bottom of the bill that there's a surcharge for anyone who doesn't drink coffee. Imagine if a bar did that.
Definitely have a VB. And Tim Tams.