"Kerrygold" news and stories

Your supermarket shelf stocks more than plain old salted and unsalted bars of butter. Here, a few of our favorite choices.

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]

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While I have experimented with different butters in baking, I'm not sure that I'd want to participate in a butter taste test - particularly not when one of the tastings involves eating butters plain to "experience their melting properties directly on the tongue." That being said, I do appreciate the efforts of the tasters from Cooks Illustrated who participated in a premium butter tasting, eating butter both plain and on baguettes to try to pick out the top butter.

The butters tested all had butterfat contents of at least 82%, higher than the standard 80%, with the exception of Land O'Lakes, which was included as a benchmark. Every single butter tested - seven unsalted and six salted - were recommended including the non-premium benchmark butter, so it sounds like you can't go wrong by choosing a name-brand butter or a butter that is "european-style." The butters were ultimately ranked by preference, but not one was a loser:

Unsalted:

• Land O'Lakes Ultra Creamy butter
• Presidente Unsalted butter
• Celles Sur Belle Premium Churn
• Land O'Lakes Unsalted Sweet butter (benchmark)
• Organic Valley European-style butter
• Plugra European-style butter
• Jana Valley Imported Sweet Cream Butter

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