Who makes the best butter?

I’m fickle with butter. I spread it on toast, melt it into a puree, rinse it in ghee, but have never settled on one brand over the other. Lately though, it’s been hard to resist the growing ranks of tastemakers who have nudged me towards one label in particular: Kerrygold. Its champions include Stanley Tucci, Sarah Jessica Parker, Oprah Winfrey, and Chrissy Teigen. In a recent issue of this magazine, Korean-American author min jin lee He admitted to keeping several kilos of the stuff in his freezer so he wouldn’t run out. Could this grass-fed Irish butter, now the second best-selling imported butter and number one in the US, deserve such acclaim?

thrown out in 1962 by the Irish Dairy Board, but only just introduced to the US in 1999, Kerrygold is certainly a great advertisement for the dairy industry in Ireland, where cows graze on fresh grass up to 300 days a year. This results in a rich, flavorful butter that is bright yellow in color due to the beta-carotene in the herb. American butters must only contain 80% butterfat, while Kerrygold Unsalted, like other European butters, contains at least 82% butterfat, resulting in a much creamier product. (The salty version is 80 percent fat.)

In taste tests on both sides of the Atlantic, Kerrygold rarely tops the list of big brands. My own opinion poll of food writers confirmed the common favorite lurpak as the preferred option. “It’s very stable, it melts very well, it has a nice sweet and salty taste, a creamy texture, and you can buy it all over the world,” says Danish cook Trine Hahnemann of the organic line.

In my taste test of eight salted and unsalted butters, I find Lurpak to be a bit boring. Better for cooking and baking, perhaps, than popping it straight into your mouth, my preferred method of testing. I like Presidentdespite or perhaps because of its slightly salty smoothness, which reminds me of French baguettes. Isigny Ste-Mere it has an attractive taste. But Kerrygold exhibits the nicest buttercup shine. And the unsalted version, which is noticeably creamier than the salty one, comes in second in my estimation to the unsalted one. Yeo Valley (which is over a pound more expensive).

Many chefs have the luxury of receiving top Kerrygold awards, some for unabashedly patriotic reasons. Conor Gadd, the chef-owner of Trullo in London, grew up in Ireland, where Kerrygold was always the family destination. “My father eats butter like it’s nobody’s business and refuses to have toast with a slab of Kerrygold unless it’s thick enough that he can see teeth marks when he bites into it,” he reports.

For homemade pastries, especially croissants and puff pastry, Phil King of Pophams prefers Président or Isigny Ste-Mère as the best supermarket options: “Normandy buttermakers have perfected the process of producing high-fat butter but with a fair amount of plasticity. ”

Philip Khoury, head pastry chef at Harrods, recommends lescure from the same region of France as commercial-only Montaigu, which was chosen at Harrods after a blind tasting of eight artisan butters.

Olivia Potts, author of Butter: a celebration, extols the virtue of cultured butter (made from cream that has been left to ferment) in dishes that show off its tart flavor, for example, its butter and vanilla shortening, scrambled with polenta or melted over steamed vegetables. “Brittan butter is heavily seasoned with salt in a way that gives it an even butterier taste,” he adds, “so it’s particularly good in Breton bakes that are supposed to have a distinctive butter flavor, like Sablés Breton.” [butter biscuits].”

When it comes to butter for the bread basket, “it’s amazing to see British producers like Ampersand, Longman and Netherend Farm competing on a world-class stage,” says Ben Boeynaems, head chef at the Colony Grill Room at The Beaumont Hotel. “Before, every restaurant in London served Échiré or Lescure; now it is rare to find a French butter on the table”. Favorites elsewhere include Fen Farm, The Estate Dairy and Rodda’s, a Cornish butter.

Also generating excitement is the soon-to-be-launched butter from the British chef Thomas Straker, whose butter-related content on TikTok made him a star. Wrapped in cartoonish packaging, the All Things Butter range includes salted and unsalted Maldon and various flavours; it is being produced by Brue Valley farm in Somerset, which also produces butters for Marks & Spencer and Aldi. I wasn’t able to test any before going to print, but given Straker’s social media influence and Gen Z’s fixation on butter (including butter boards), the question may be whether this “disruptive brand” has what it takes to be the next Kerrygold. , a hype-worthy brand for a new wave of butter addicts. As Straker would say, spread the word.

@ajesh34

Top butters, clockwise from top left: butter imported from Finland. Meierismør. Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter. Organic Beurre Moule

Bottom butters, clockwise from top left: Yoghurtbutter. Trention donkey. Esterzing Vipiteno Donkey. Meierismør