What to do with good butter?

I received a few pounds of nice quality Amish butter from a friend recently. I'm looking for some ideas for what to do with it that will highlight the better quality. I've used it on dinner rolls and toast but I've still got pounds to go. I thought maybe butter cookies but I paid up for the quality Irish stuff from Trader Joe's last year and didn't really notice that much difference. Any thoughts?

I bought some Amish butter from the Farmer's Market this summer and used some of it to make a nice herbed butter. I chopped up fresh herbs, mixed 'em in, rolled it in wax paper, and put it into the freezer to set for a bit. Later, I cut it into fancy butter pats for company.

You could make flavored butters: honey butter and truffle butter come to mind. You might also (if you were feeling very ambitious) make candy or macaroons with a buttercream filling.

This might also be the time to make any number of things that call for brown butter, such as madeleines (chez pim has a lovely recipe) or a nice fish fillet, or perhaps ravioli in brown butter with fried sage leaves.

Seems to me that excellent butter would be best all by itself on bread or noodles or vegetables. Using it in cooked items (e.g. cookies) or preparing a compound butter from it would seem to cover over the fine flavor rather than setting it off. I understand you have a lot, but the stuff keeps.

Sorry if I seem a party pooper here, but my tendency would be to use good stuff (whether butter or wine or anything else) with minimal "adulteration."

The Wife just brought home some very good Irish butter (perhaps the same stuff you got from Trader Joe's), and we just have it on toast and pancakes; for cooking, we just use decent, but not great, butter we get from a regular supermarket.

Might try making some straight-up buttery croissants.

I agree that it's just too expensive to use in most of my baking but if you have a good, plain butter cookie recipe, it's worth it to use it there. Otherwise, just spread on great bread is a fantastic use.

I'd generally describe myself as a culinary minimalist, but I don't subscribe to the theory that you should use really good butter in as raw a state as possible. Butter's main role is to enhance the flavor and texture of other things*. Really great butter will make great cookies even greater. Really good butter with fresh herbs will be delicious. I'd say just use your really good butter in whatever dishes you like that call for butter. Those dishes will taste better as a result.

That said, radishes smeared with lightly salted butter and nothing else are about as perfect a food as I can imagine.


*that's the main role in the kitchen, at least. Butter may play entirely different roles elsewhere in the house, but I'd select French butter over Amish for that.

Kennyz wrote:I'd generally describe myself as a culinary minimalist, but I don't subscribe to the theory that you should use really good butter in as raw a state as possible. Butter's main role is to enhance the flavor and texture of other things*. Really great butter will make great cookies even greater. Really good butter with fresh herbs will be delicious. I'd say just use your really good butter in whatever dishes you like that call for butter. Those dishes will taste better as a result.

That said, radishes smeared with lightly salted butter and nothing else are about as perfect a food as I can imagine.


*that's the main role in the kitchen, at least. Butter may play entirely different roles elsewhere in the house, but I'd select French butter over Amish for that.

The better the ingredients, the better the final cooked product; true. I think, though, if you're trying to get the most value out of high-end ingredients, it's best to take a non-interventionist approach, like butter on radishes, an excellent tasting and minimalist appetizer or snack.

PS. Is that footnote a reference to "Last Tango in Paris"?

David Hammond wrote:PS. Is that footnote a reference to "Last Tango in Paris"?

None of the witty lines I can think of that relate to the use of butter in Last Tango are appropriate for daytime LTHing.

I love using good butter to caramelize onions. I find that there's a big difference in taste from onions caramelized in regular, everyday butter...even if the onions prepared with good butter end up being covered by a lot of other flavors in the final dish (e.g. Bridgestone's laxpudding)...a very worthwhile use of the good stuff.

I think the big thing to consider when cooking or baking is to use good butter (Plugra, Clover, Lurpak, Kerry) , as opposed to Land O' Lakes or generic brands. The lesser butters are just devoid of flavor and texture. But I wouldn't use some of the more delicate butters ( Delitia Parmigiano Reggiano Butter, Burro di Bufala).

I use the more delicate butters as a finishing butter adding it just before plating. But any of the better butters are such a treat on homemade bread. There's quite a difference between each of the butters it's always fun to have a couple good ones on hand at any given time.

yum yum!

dan

Melissa Graham recently wrote a breakdown of locally or sustainably-produced high quality butters which includes a couple recipes specifically tailored to the qualities of a couple of the butters highlighted.

Here's the article.

Two recipes:
Wheatmeal Shortbread
Puff Pastry

Best,
Michael

David Hammond wrote:Seems to me that excellent butter would be best all by itself on bread or noodles or vegetables. Using it in cooked items (e.g. cookies) or preparing a compound butter from it would seem to cover over the fine flavor rather than setting it off. I understand you have a lot, but the stuff keeps.

Agreed. I regularly bring back large rolls of Amish butter from Schrock's general store near Spartansburg, PA (which I've been meaning to post about, but have no pics). It almost seems a waste to use it in baked goods, although I'm sure it would be tasty.

I cut the rolls in 2 or 3-inch discs, vacuum-seal the discs and freeze individually. I give the butter as gifts, but it's also our house butter-the stuff we put out with baskets of bread. I also use it to finish sauces, and most recently I tried the butter-radish combo. Sublime in its simplicity.

It was initially an experiment to see if anyone could tell the difference, but I have used French butter (Appellation d'Origine Controlee Issingny-sur-Mer) to delicious effect in very American buttermilk biscuit dough. This was judged better than three other batches made with 1) all-leaf lard, 2) half- leaf lard half-supermarket (national brand) butter, or 3) all-supermarket (national brand) butter by none other than GWiv himself. I tried it again yesterday with leaf lard and French butter batches. Both had their charms. As a lover of biscuits, I have to say that I don't feel that using your good butter (or your precious leaf lard) in biscuits is a waste at all. I have yet to try leaf lard straight up on radishes, though. I might have to get back to you on that one.

I'm from the school that believes that good quality butter makes for a superior end product. Obviously, as others have stated, high quality butter is more likely to impact results in recipes that have very few ingredients - butter cookies, sole meunière, caramels.

Dorrie Greenspan's blog has an interesting piece on butter. Here is the link: http://www.doriegreenspan.com/dorie_gre ... annee.html

Jyoti

The best thing we've found so far to do with a high-quality butter is put it in the middle of the table with slices of crusty bread and a bottle of wine.

How about getting some really good cream to go with it and making Normandy mussels?

(BTW, is there a thread anywhere here to introduce one's self?)