Ep 32: Butter Makes Everything Better
Let's dive into butter—the best ingredient to elevate your baking game. We'll explore why different types of butter vary in price and quality, talk about making your own butter, including cultured butter, and discuss practical tips for using butter in holiday baking. Perfect for anyone prepping for a festive baking spree, tune in to understand how to choose and use butter to its fullest potential.
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0:00
So butter makes everything better. Right? I mean, we've all heard that I've said it myself. Oh, 10, 12,000 times. But butter is something we use every day. I wanted to do a little shorty episode for you because butter. Does make everything better. But what makes butter good butter? Why are you paying$4 a pound for one type of butter and$10 a pound for another today, I'm going to answer the questions.
Speaker: 0:37
Welcome to the Empty Nest Kitchen, where we're finding fun in the kitchen now that the kids have flown the coop. I'm Christine Van Bloem, a cooking teacher with over 25 years of experience, here to show you tips, tricks, and joy in your kitchen, all while trying something new. Let's get cooking!
1:00
It's holiday baking time. And if you're like me, you're getting ready to whip up. A bunch of different batches of cookies. I have these Allmand cloud cookies that I'm making that have no added fat to them. They're really delicious. It's a king Arthur recipe. I use. And then I've got my very, almost famous chocolate chip cookies. That use tons of butter, but does butter. Water make a difference. Does the butter that you choose? Change the cookies that you bake. What makes butters better or maybe not better, but what makes them different? What's the difference between the butter you find? At Wegmans or Costco. And something we would consider a high-end butter, like Kerrygold butter, or PLU GRA. Have you ever heard of PLU GRA it's actually pretty good stuff, but let's talk about what butter is. And truthfully you need one ingredient. For butter. And we all know that's heavy cream. Back when I was in culinary school in New York city. Almost 30 years ago. I remember we would get a heavy cream that was crazy high in the butterfat. It was a 42% butterfat cream. I haven't seen that since I left culinary school. Here where I live just at the regular grocery store, we're finding 36% butterfat cream. And that is that amount of fat that you were going to be able to make into butter. And just for comparison sake. A container of whole milk. Contains 4% fat. And 2% milk up. You guessed it. 2% fat. Skim, of course contains no fat. It's all been removed, which is why it tastes like. But when you're using heavy cream, it enables you to whip it to the point where you can make butter. And if you've got kids around, this is actually, I'm sure you remember doing this experiment in elementary school. Where you would take a jar. And your teacher would put some cream in it and everybody would sit criss, cross applesauce and pass the jar around and shake it. Right. And at the end you would have butter. And then, the teacher would then take the butter and we'd all get a little piece of bread and she'd spread the butter on it. And then we'd all taste what we had just made and we go, oh right. Very. Be crazy about it. If you wanted to make. Just a basic butter. You're going to take heavy cream. And if you have young assistants, You can always do the shaky method. That's super fun. Or I have a kitchen aid mixer. I use that you could use a hand mixer to. But you will beat it to the point where it looks like. Fluffy delicious whipped cream. Now we're not adding anything to it. We're not even adding salt at this point. And you're going to take your heavy cream and you are going to whip it past. That gorgeous whipped cream phase and what's going to happen. We all know the butter. Milk will come away from the fat it separates. And you're left with two separate ingredients. You've got your butter and you've got your buttermilk and yes, you can use that buttermilk in cooking. I make some pancakes. It's a fancy time of year. Right? We want to have fancy breakfast. But that butter, what you then do is you take it and you squeeze it. And more buttermilk will come out of that. Right. It's really an important step where you're going to squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, get rid of that. Or. I get that buttermilk out of there. And then some folks give it a rinse in cold water and there you go. That is how you make some unsalted butter. Now. Salt to add salt to your butter, to make it really equivalent with most brands of salted butter. You're going to add just a teeny bit, just a quarter teaspoon of salt. To about four ounces of butter. That's not that much. Right. So you can do that today. There you go basic, Doug. Now another option is cultured butter. And we used to offer a bread baking class, an artisan bread baking class. It was five hours long. Chef Caroline. Would do it. We do it the second Saturday in January. I mean, we had this like clockwork. And I remember saying to her one year, Hey, why don't we add some butter into the mix? Let's make some butter to go with it. And because chef Caroline is chef Caroline and she's so amazing. She said, let's do two kinds of butter. Let's do a regular shaken butter. You know, whiskey butter, like I just described. And let's make a cultured butter. And I remember saying, okay, do you know your class? Do what you want to do? And she said, holy bananas, did they go crazy for the cultured butter? Because cultured butter, just like, it sounds has more happening in it. It's a longer process, of course. So we couldn't just make it in the class and have it made. But it's a recipe that typically involves not just your heavy cream. But something maybe with a little Tang to it. You could use a whole milk, yogurt, and you're going to take your cream and your yogurt, and you're going to whisk them together and then leave it in your kitchen. We used to do this when we would make creme fresh. And creme fresh is delicious, but that's another episode. So you would take your combination of creaming yogurt and then you'd set it on the counter and leave it there. I don't know, day and a half, anywhere from a day to a day and a half and it would start to thicken and it would get, you can imagine because it's got some yogurt in it. It's got a little more Tang. So then you would take it, you'd pop it in the fridge for just a little bit, and then you're going to take it and do the whole thing. Strain it, make sure you whip it really, really well till the. Butter starts to separate from the buttermilk. And there you go. I mean, these are the basics. If you'd look New York times cooking section is one of my favorites. I absolutely love it. I use it for reference all the time. I pull tons of their recipes, but they have a fantastic recipe for homemade cultured butter. And I will even put that link in the show notes for you. But because of that extra Tang and because of that extra time, it has the opportunity to develop. A deeper butter flavor. And that was always hands down the winner. Whenever chef Caroline would make the two types. So if you're feeling fancy, And again, you can just buy your butter. You don't have to make butter. But if you're feeling fancy, you could give that a try. But what I really want you to know is why are you paying so much more for that Kerry gold or that PLU GRA or any one of a number of types of really high-end butter? What makes those so expensive? And is it worth it to you? And first I'm going to say. It's your dime. So you get to decide I've just bought four pounds of Wegmans butter today. That is what I'm going to be using for my cookies. When I buy the really good stuff and I'll buy Kerrygold, unsalted butter, typically at Costco, because it's a pretty good price there. I don't typically buy the PLU grip because they're just so pricey right now. And it's because they contain. More butterfat and less water. And what that does is not only gives it a richer flavor, but it also makes it creamier. They say that PLU GRA is turned more slowly, which makes it more pliable. It's all because it's got less water and they're pulling. Really good cream. They're really getting, you know, the best cream that they can. I would suspect very happy cows. But I typically will get that Kerry gold at Costco. Like I said, because. There I can rationalize the price difference. And it is a tastier butter. It's a little more yellow, which I like, and it does have a little more of that creamy. This factor. So when it comes to the butter. That you're going to use. I like to say use the best that you can afford. Like I said, I will buy it for special occasions. But I do tend to go with either the Wegmans or the Costco butter. But the real question, I think when it comes to butter is unsalted versus salted. When I've got a fresh roll right out of the oven hole, who, who, I would love a little salt on my butter there, but I pretty much exclusively by. Unsalted butter. I wish I could give you a great reason. The real reason is because that's what I learned in culinary school. All those decades ago. Now. Typically, what it means to you is say you get to control the amount of salt in your recipe. Sometimes when you're pulling a recipe from a well-known or really reputable source. You will see that it says, you know, if using salted butter omit one quarter teaspoon or something along those lines, but what it really is is you controlling the flavor the whole way. When I make my chocolate chip cookies, I measure hard on my salt because I like them to have a little bit of an edge to it. But I only use unsalted butter. So it's what are you using them for? Are you making really beautiful, fresh rolls? I love our fresh roll carpet up, but all more, typically keep to the unsalted butter and then put a little sprinkle of either diamond crystal. And if you've listened to the salt episode, You know, I love my diamond crystal. And if you haven't go back and listen to it's one of my first episodes. Or you could use maybe a little pitch of Maldon salt. And that's mentioned in that episode too. Because Malden is an English flake, salt, and it has really big crystals and they're very crunchy. It's really good stuff. It is. Totally worth having some but I would say. Keep to the unsalted butter and have some good salt around for you. Also, if you are baking with butter and it says that you need to make sure your butter is softened. To room temperature rate, because if you are trying to. Bake and your butter is not soft enough. It will be clumpy and it won't. Be as spreadable it's it's a little trickier to work with. You want to make sure that if you push on your butter with a finger, you're going to leave a bit of a dent and a bit of a fingerprint. Now, your bar. Your fingers, shouldn't go the whole way through that butter. But that is how we know to do it. Typically, 30 minutes or an hour out at room temperature is going to work right now. I'm in an old drafty house. So my house is a little chillier. It can take a little longer. I also have no issue using the microwave. And let me tell you this. If you're using the microwave only on full power. You are losing all the nuances here because I love to use all the different power settings. Just by percentage of power. So a lot of microwaves you can do 10, 20, 30, 40, 50%. And so on up to a hundred. I will use 20% power to soften my butter. It might take a little bit longer than if you put it in full blast, but you're not going to have to worry about it melting on you because melted and softened are very different things. Okay, they're going to change the texture of your baked goods. So we want to make sure we're just using the softened, but I'll do 30 seconds at 20% power. I'll take it. Alternate. I'll do another 20 seconds checking each time. I just check each time I do it to make sure it's starting to soften. It'll just take a minute or two and then you'll have butter ready to go. I've also seen that if you have. Glass that you can fit over your butter. Think about standing your butter upright, I guess. And you fill the class with really hot water. Let it set for a minute, dump that out and then put the glass. Over your butter, that gives it an environment to help it soften as well. So the basics of butter and yes, it does make everything butter. I know I didn't address. Fake butters or plant butters. And they all have their place. I mean, if you're like me, you grew up, my grandma called it Oleo. And I remember when sheds spread was invented and we were all like, oh, it's soft immediately. That's amazing for toast. Nowadays, I don't need too much of that. And truthfully as a heart patient, I try not to go too butter, crazy, not even on my Eggos. So. That's it happy butter, happy Christmas. I'm going to be taking a break next week for the holiday. If you have questions, let me know, be sure to check out the show notes and you know, once you get through Christmas, you are going to be feeling. A little, like you need to take some more control. And that is when menopause meal plans is going to be the perfect thing for you with really well-balanced really tasty, healthy dinners that you're going to make during the week. You're going to feel great. It's just going to be a good thing for you. You can check out my oppose meal plans at Empty Nest Kitchen dot com. And stay tuned because boy, do I have some fun classes coming up in January? Thank you to everyone. Happy holidays, Merry Christmas. And I hope the rest of the gear is spectacular. And as always, I'll see in the kitchen.
