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Posts with tag Butter Taste Test

Premium butter taste test

grid of nine kinds of butter
It was several years ago that I started thinking more carefully about the butter I was using in my cooking and baking. I switched to unsalted for baking and tried to get my hands on locally produced, organic butter for toast topping and sauce-finishing. These days I am positively addicted to the cultured butter from Vermont Butter and Cheese (not particularly local, but the best I've found around Philly).

Miss Ginsu has taken butter-tasting to a level far above my own measly explorations. Last week, she headed out on her bike and bought nine varieties of premium and imported butters, all unsalted (at least that was her intent, she did end up with salted Kerrygold butter unintentionally). Working methodically through all of them, she rated them on a graded scale. The winner of her test was Elle & Vire, an imported French butter.

What's your favorite butter?

[via Serious Eats]

Is Plugra really worth it?

"European style" is a descriptor applied to butter more and more often these days. One of the most popular brands, Plugra, is appearing in more and more grocery stores alongside the regular butter, rather than being confined to the specialty stores it originally appeared in. The difference between the European-style butters and standard butters is the butterfat content. Regular butter has 80% butterfat and 20% water, while butters like Plugra have about 2.5-3% more butterfat. This gives them a slightly creamier, richer taste. In a direct comparison, the flavor difference is noticeable on toast, which is the most convenient way to taste-test butter without taking a bite out of the stick.

But is the difference noticeable when cooking or baking? For cooking, unless you are making a particularly buttery dish, I have to say that I could not tell the difference. Baking is another matter. A taste test between two batches of chocolate chip cookies (made with the same recipe) using both normal and European-style butters revealed that the European-style, higher butterfat cookies had a more buttery taste. The cookies were slightly more delicious than the ones made with standard butter because of the enhanced butter flavor. Especially considering that the prices for the two types of butter are much close than they were 5 years ago, it is definitely worth using Plugra or another European-style butter over the standard butters.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]

Tip of the Day

With a few simple steps, you can make sure your mushrooms are caramelized rather than oil-filled and steamed.

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