Our 5 Favorite Butters Of All Time
Kemp Minifie
We never turned our back on butter — real butter — throughout all the various diet crazes of years past. So we were heartened to read in Mark Bittman’s op-ed in the New York Times that saturated fat isn’t the villain it was touted to be in years past.
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Don’t get us wrong — we’re not about to start piling on the golden wonder; moderation is the word. But good butter is something to be savored: A melting puddle in a bowl of hot oatmeal or mashed into mashed potatoes. A quick poll of our staff brought up these longtime favorites, not listed in any order of preference. Note that all the butters we happen to love are wrapped in foil, not wax paper. Foil is the only material that protects butter from absorbing the other aromas wafting inside your fridge.
Vermont Butter and Cheese Creamery: This yellow gold tastes like European cultured butters, and yet it’s made on this side of the Atlantic in northeastern Vermont. It’s good in and on everything, and makes the most tender shortbread and cookies, thanks to its high butterfat content, but we think the butter, when simply spread on toast—whether from a high-end artisanal or low-brow squishy white loaf—shows it’s sexy side the best.
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Celles Sur Belle: Make sure you’ve got your French Sel Gris (gray sea salt) or Mon Dieu, English Maldon sea salt ready for this glorious French unsalted butter, made from cultured cream in its namesake village in western France. Taste the butter on its own and you’ll understand the importance of terroir and the butter’s AOC (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlé) protection designation. If you ever wondered why the French are crazy for radishes with butter and salt, try smearing some of this butter on a farm-fresh breakfast radish, sprinkle it with some of Brittany’s sel gris,and your first bite will make itabundantly clear.
Kerrygold: Churned with cream from Irish cows that eat Irish grass—not hay—this butter provides an efficient way for humans to absorb the fat-soluble nutrients from grass. Kerrygold is a dream to bake with, especially pastry, because of its plasticity. Slice a cold stick of butter from most mass-market American producers and the pieces break off. Kerrygold never breaks; it bends and curls, and in the most graceful way. For that same reason it’s also the perfect spreading butter for something as delicate as cornbread or hot-from-the-oven biscuits.
Kate’s Homemade Butter: Kate’s is made the old-fashioned way in small batches in Maine from fresh cream, not cultured cream, which gives it a clean, smooth, pure buttery flavor. It makes a beautiful butter cake, but we’re just as likely to put a generous pat of it on a hot stack of pancakes or waffles, add some real maple syrup, and dig in.
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Organic Valley: From this farmer-owned cooperative in Wisconsin come a variety of butters. Besides their stick butter packed in 1-pound boxes, they offer 1/2-pound blocks of pasture butter as well as a European-style cultured butter. Both are excellent, but we’re partial to the pasture butter.Those cows aren’t just eating any ol’ grass—they’re eating organic grass and passing on all its nutrient-rich goodness! Make a flavored butterwith minced garlic, parsley, and lemon juice, then dollop it onto a grilled grass-fed steak or bison steak, or even a baked potato, and you are in for a treat.
Lurpak: Lurpack is from Denmark. So are those insanely addictive Danish butter cookies in their distinctive blue tins. The Danes have a good thing going with their cookies, so why wouldn’t we lust for their butter, too? And we do! To see just how good it is, try their butter in our Off-to-Bed Butter Cookies.
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