I'm definitely not as much a butter aficionado as the author of the article is, just wanted to add that for me one of the best choices when it comes to European butter is the Irish Kerrygold. It's absolutely great butter, imo it's better even compared to more expensive French butters.
Related, one of my best memories related to butter, and a genuine good memory all around, was when my grandma was asking me to make butter while she was busy doing some other stuff around the house. It was easy enough and she knew that even city-boy me couldn't mess that simple thing up. It was very similar to what this guy is doing in this video [1]
Being from Northern Ireland, I always find it fascinating that American's think kerrygold butter is fancy. It's just our standard butter here and down south.
And I'll third it! As an Irishman living abroad I find most local butters extremely tasteless. Luckily it's not too hard to find Kerrygold in most supermarkets in the UK.
In the USA, it's usually available at 100% markup over domestic commodity butter. Not terribly expensive, honestly, but the most expensive butter available in many supermarkets, and it's only been widely available in the last 3-5 years. And sadly I suspect the US-market Kerrygold is a slightly different formulation/recipe than I remember getting in the UK.
For Germany (and other European countries) that’s only partly true. Kerrygold and similar butters sell in two varieties. With salt (silver wrapper) and without (golden wrapper). The salt-free variety is way more popular, so smaller shops may not always have salted Kerrygold and it may often sell out first when butter is on offer.
Great article btw that explained why butter in the US was so tasteless when I tried it. (Btw, butter I tried in Italy or Spain has the same problems)
Kerrygold is great for strong savory foods, but I am too American to enjoy itin some cases. Frying eggs, grilled cheese, some cookies all suffer from the grassy taste overriding weaker flavors. American butter doesn't really taste like anything but cream/fat to me.
Country Life Butter is the only one I remember. It's the British equivalent to Ireland's Kerrygold and New Zealand's Anchor as the brand was started by a consortium of the Milk Marketing Board and the large dairies.
Though apparently Anchor is now produced in the UK for the UK market.
> In the United Kingdom, Anchor block butter was imported from New Zealand until August 2012 when Arla Foods UK, the British licensee, transferred production to a local factory at Westbury, Wiltshire, using British cream.[6]
I'll have to see if I can find it at a store. I'm always down to improve my butter experience. I will say that I was very let down by Kerrygold. It's noticeably better if you are having just plain buttered toast, but otherwise I can't taste any difference between it and the normal butter one sees at the store.
Growing up in Britain standard butter was uncultured and salted. British/Irish/New Zealand/Danish butter brands were all in the supermarket and all tasted pretty similar to me. US butter doesn't seem to taste of anything at all but I can usually get Kerrygold. I assume it's just because the rainy climate in northwestern Europe / New Zealand means the cows are mostly fed on grass.
> But while the American standard remains, well, the standard, it’s not as hard as it once was to find American-made butter with at least 82% butterfat and all the layered, complex flavors found in European butters.
This is key. If you really look, you can find gems pretty much everywhere even when the standard stuff in supermarkets is terrible. Good stuff in supermarkets is an indication of what local people value overall, so it is interesting from a cultural perspective. However, it is not an accurate view of what local producers can do.
Kerrygold in Germany is sold in the standard gold wrapper but unsalted. I was really surprised having come from the UK where it's salted and utterly delicious. If you want the salted stuff you have to hunt for silver labels, and I have only started to find these recently and only then in the biggest supermarkets.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-10-02/how-irish...
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