Fancy Butter Taste Test

Required Eating

Posted by Adam Kuban, April 3, 2008 at 9:45 AM

In the past year or so, my local grocery store upped its number of high-end butter offerings. In addition to the Lurpak and Plugra brands I'd known, there were entrants from Italy, Ireland, and France. Is there a huge difference among them all? The blogger Miss Ginsu attempts to find out by tasting nine different high-end butters, domestic and imported.

4 Comments | Tags: butter

4 Comments:

Dissapointing review - Kerrygold is one of the best butters available. If Miss Ginsu doesn't like salted butter, she should have excluded this or gone out to find the unsalted Kerrygold (available at Fairway)

Soup_Dumpling at 10:53AM on 04/03/08

It actually didn't say "salted" in a clear way on the package. I only found out it was salted when I checked the ingredients list. The packaging itself is a bit confusing, as you can see at their website here. Seems like there's a lot of love for kerrygold butter, though. I've already gotten two defensive comments.

missginsu at 11:42AM on 04/03/08

Add me to the list of Kerrygold lovers. The unsalted is much harder to find around here, but I mostly use unsalted for cooking and baking anyway, so I'd rather buy a less expensive brand for that.

I've tried so many imported butters. The big problems I always run across are (1) no longer fresh tasting and/or (2) tastes like it's been allowed to get too warm, then re-chilled, either during shipping or stocking. I was so excited to find imported Danish butter a while back, because the best butter I've ever eaten anywhere, EVER, was in Denmark. Totally disappointing. But again, I attribute that to poor handling in distribution channels and/or by the individual retailer. Shame.

Kerrygold seems to be better cared for in distribution. I've only gotten one "bad" block, and even that wasn't too bad.

LoCo at 3:28PM on 04/03/08

Kerrygold is my favorite bread-butter (not for cooking, though it can be great in certain simple recipes). I also like the Parmigianno butter (I agree it's less creamy) and Vermont Butter and Cheese Company butter (not in the list) is another favorite for cooking-and-bread-butter.

I just had Land o Lakes on vacation where I couldn't find anything else and boy has my palate changed since childhood. It was sooo boring. Maybe butter's like dark chocolate, once you get used to the good stuff, there's no going back.

caviarandcodfish at 3:46PM on 04/03/08

Add a comment:

Previewing your comment:

HTML Hints

Some HTML is OK: <a href="URL">link</a>, <strong>strong</strong>, <em>em</em>

Comment Guidelines

Post whatever you want, just keep it seriously about eats, seriously. We reserve the right to delete off-topic or inflammatory comments. Learn more at our Comment Policy page.

If you see something not so nice, please, report an inappropriate comment.