Better Plain Than Fancy

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Remember the old Parkay margarine commercials with the talking containers that said, “Butter?” Today, decades later, Parkay’s slogan is still: “The flavor says, ‘Butter!'” But here’s a question worth asking: Just what does butter taste like anyway?


Time was when answering that question was as simple as heading down to the supermarket and buying a pound of Breakstone’s, or Land O’Lakes, or whatever the store’s default brand was. Nowadays, though, most supermarkets also carry organic butter, European-style butter, and more. High-end markets like Whole Foods have a dizzying array of choices: double-churned butter, cultured butter, goat butter; French butter, Irish butter, Danish butter; unsalted, lightly salted, slightly salted, and sea-salted.


Can all these butters taste so different from each other? And are they really better than Breakstone’s? In an attempt to find out, I recently purchased as many butters as I could find (prompting a very quizzical look from the cashier at Whole Foods, which had the widest selection), brought them home, and left them out for a few hours to soften.


Then I summoned my friend Ruth – or, as we’ll call her for the purposes of this project, the Dairy Queen. We armed ourselves with a box of matzos (a suitably neutral butter-delivery device) and a pack of English muffins (ideal for assessing melted butter). Using a few sticks of Breakstone’s as our baseline for comparisons, we sat down to immerse ourselves in butter.


One thing became immediately clear: There’s no such thing as bad butter. Or at least there was no bad butter amid the two dozen or so varieties laid out before us. Bite after bite, this was a most enjoyable task.


But as we tasted our way through the ranks, it also became apparent that most butter tastes like, well, butter. In fact, the Dairy Queen and I found ourselves saying, “Tastes like butter” so frequently that we soon shortened it to “TLB.” We tried blindfold tests. We tried savoring the aroma before tasting. We tried cleansing our palates in between bites. But the results were almost always the same: TLB.


Fortunately, there were a few butters that stood out from the rest (see below). But why did so many of these supposedly distinct products taste alike? And why do old-timers often say that butter used to taste better years ago – and that its flavor varied depending on the time of year?


The answer, as with so many food-related questions, boils down to factory farming. For starters, dairy cows of generations past roamed in the pasture, eating fresh green grass in warm weather, then hay in fall and winter. The varied diet affected the flavor of their milk and cream, the latter of which was then churned into butter. Nowadays, most dairy farms keep their cows indoors and feed them the same diet all year long, eliminating seasonal variations.That diet is often grain, because it’s cheap and subsidized, but it’s not what cows are supposed to eat. Cows are ruminants, which means their digestive systems are equipped for grass, not grains, which stress their systems and may result in inferior milk.


Secondly, today’s dairy farms generally use Holstein cows, whose chief advantage is high milk production. It’s generally agreed that Jerseys, Guernseys, and Brown Swiss produce richer, creamier milk, but those breeds aren’t used much anymore. It’s a case of quantity winning out over quality.


Also, in the old days, cream was usually collected over the course of several milkings. It was, therefore, a few days old by the time it was churned. The cream fermented a bit during this time, as bacteria converted milk sugars into lactic acid. Butter made from this type of cream is called “cultured butter” and tends to have a richer flavor. But today’s butter is made from pasteurized cream, resulting in a blander product.


As the Dairy Queen and I pondered all this, an idea began churning in my brain. If the key lies in the cream, why not get the best cream possible and then make our own butter? There’s no trick to it – if you’ve ever whipped cream, there’s a good chance you’ve accidentally made butter yourself.


So, not having a cow of my own, I began searching for top-notch cream. The best option would be unpasteurized or “raw,” but that’s only available on the grounds of farms or on the dairy black market. (Yes, there really is such a thing.) I didn’t have time to pursue those, so I got the next best thing: two pints of Natural by Nature organic heavy cream – pasteurized but not ultra-pasteurized, and produced by grass-fed cows, including Holsteins, Jerseys, and Guernseys.


The Dairy Queen and I let the cream come to room temperature, poured it into a large bowl, and began beating it with an electric mixer set on medium. This agitated the fat globules within the cream, causing them to clump together. Within a minute or two, the cream had thickened to form soft peaks, and soon after that it held stiff peaks. If we stopped here, we’d have perfect whipped cream.


But instead we kept beating. As the fat globules continued to destabilize, the offwhite cream began to turn pale yellow, and the texture began to resemble cottage cheese. Soon there was that magical moment, almost like alchemy, as the mixture seized up and separated. We suddenly had about a pound of creamy butter sitting in a pool of liquid – buttermilk.


After pouring off the buttermilk to use later, we rinsed and kneaded the butter to remove every last bit of liquid (this helps keep the butter from going rancid). Then we divided the butter into two portions and mixed a teaspoon of kosher salt into one of them. The whole thing had taken less than 15 minutes.


Making butter was fun and fascinating, but how did it taste? I hate to say it, but here’s the sad truth: TLB. No worse than Breakstone’s, certainly, but no better either.


The lesson: While there are some exceptions, for the most part, butter is butter. And while you probably knew this already, I can confirm that Parkay most assuredly does not TLB, no matter what the slogan is.


Cream of the Crop


Our taste tests indicate that you’ll be in good shape with basic supermarket butter like Breakstone’s, Land O’Lakes, or Hotel Bar. But if you want something a cut above, a few brands stand out from the crowd:


PARMIGIANO REGGIANO BUTTER ($4.49 for 8 oz. at Union Market, 756 Union St., Brooklyn): No, it’s not cheese. But the cream used for this unsalted Italian butter comes from the same cows whose milk is used for Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. It was by far the best butter sampled for this article, with a depth of flavor and creamy finish that other brands lacked. And as a nice bonus, it’s shaped into an appealingly rustic-looking slab and packaged in a grommet-sealed paper wrapper.


VERMONT BUTTER & CHEESE COMPANY CULTURED BUTTER ($5 for 8 oz. at Whole Foods and gourmet markets):Years ago, “cultured” meant the butter was made from slightly fermented unpasteurized cream; today it means a bacterial culture was added to the cream after pasteurization, resulting in a slightly more complex-flavored product. This brand’s salted and sweet versions are both very good, and there’s also a variety with crunchy crystals of sea salt, but it’s packaged in an annoyingly ornate little basket – and is wildly overpriced ($7.49 for 6 oz.).


KERRYGOLD IRISH BUTTER ($5 for 8 oz. at Whole Foods): This butter, supposedly produced from pasture-fed cows, was unremarkable at room temperature. But it performed much better when sampled straight out of the refrigerator: Whereas most other brands’ flavors were blunted by the colder temperature, this one retained most of its buttery taste. A good impulse butter, as it were.


KATE’S HOMEMADE BUTTER ($4.89 for 1 lb. at Whole Foods): This butter, made in small batches in Maine, has a bit more character than the supermarket brands. And the salted variety is less aggressively salty than most of its counterparts, so the saltiness complements the buttery flavor instead of masking or overwhelming it.


The New York Sun

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