Butter stick

What could be better than a slice of fresh bread slathered with butter? Rich, buttery shortbreat, perhaps? A fish doused in a bath of brown butter and capers? Or simple pan juices enriched with a swirl of butter? In the kitchen, butter is a tasty and very useful fat. Butter melts at just below body temperature, giving it a luscious sensation on the tongue, and it imparts a rich, creamy taste. Just a litle butter adds flavor to everything we eat. Butter is also an excellent flavor carrier: spike it with garlic and herbs or sugar and orange and it delivers those flavors to everything it touches.

Love is like butter. It is good with bread. - Yiddish Proverb

Butter is unique in the world of fat. Unlike other animal fats, it doesn’t require that we kill an animal to obtain it, and without us it wouldn’t exist. But just what is butter, exactly? The science behind the transformation of liquid milk into a solid fat is not completely understood. Anyone who has been distracted while whipping cream knows how quickly it can turn to butter. Whipped too long, cream changes from a stable foam into a combination of fatty globules and a watery liquid, or buttermilk. Those fatty globules are not pure fat, but an emulsion of butterfat, water, and milk solids. The fat content of butter is naturally about 82% – this is the European standard for butter – although it can range upto 86%, depending on the cow and its diet. In North America, butter’s minimum fat content is set at 80%, so water is often added to lower the butterfat to the legal minimum. What’s in the other 20% of butter? Mostly water – around 18%, which explains the sizzle when butter hits a hot pan – and the rest is milk solids. Those milk solids will burn in the pan if the butter gets too hot, which is why butter is not the best fat for frying.

Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat. - Hermann Goering

Butter is a very complex fat, containing more than 500 fatty acids and 400 volatile compounds, all of which determine its flavor. The breed of cow, its diet, and the season all affect the taste, texture, and look of butter. Most of us have forgotten that butter, like many foods, is seasonal.

If you take the cow’s milk and butter, you must accept her kicks, too. - Indian Proverb

In spring and early summer, butter is deeper yellow because the cows eat grass at this time of year, which has a high percentage of orange and yellow carotenes. The pasture is also filled with herbs and flowers, which gives the butter floral and herbal notes. In winter, the cow’s diet is supplemented with silage, so the butter is pale, higher in fat, firmer and milder in taste. There is a direct link between what the cow eats and the flavor of its butter, but most of us have never tasted herbs or flowers in our butter.

Butter spoils no meat. - Danish Proverb

Before the advent of refrigeration, butter shipped to towns and cities was highly salted to preserve it, but it still often went rancid and was sometimes adulterated. Only those who lived in the countryside and churned their own enjoyed the taste of fresh butter. Butter’s delicate flavor is so easily overwhelmed that most of us don’t know what good, fresh butter from grassfed cows tastes like.

To promise more butter than bread; to promise the best. - French Proverb

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