Creaming Butter and Sugar - Crystal Farms vs. Weyauwega Brand

I wanted to see how another brand of butter behaves when it's creamed with sugar. My butter experiments so far have been using unsalted butter from Weyauwega Star Dairy, which is labeled "Weyauwega" on the boxes. Weyauwega Star Dairy is a Wisconsin dairy near Waupaca that sells its own brand of products to supermarkets in the Madison area; I don't know how far-flung their sales are. It is a fourth-generation family dairy and I bet they know their business extremely well. The cost of the butter at Woodman's where I purchase it is significantly less than Land O' Lakes or other national name brands, but I think it is high quality, pure butter. No additives are mentioned on the box, and it is labeled "Grade AA," which is the highest grade for butter.

A couple of months ago, I made different batches of butter cookies with Land O' Lakes and Crystal Farms unsalted butters and compared the cookies with some I made with Weyauwega butter. I thought there was quite a big difference in taste. I liked the cookies made with Land O' Lakes and Crystal Farms butters significantly more than the ones I made with Weyauwega butter. There was a difference in taste. Why?

I think the key to taste difference is on the Crystal Farms box. "Ingredients: Cream, Natural Flavorings," it says. So there you are - natural flavorings. Crystal Farms butter is not pure butter, and when you make cookies that have in them pretty much nothing but butter, sugar, flour, and a little vanilla flavoring, anything added to the butter to flavor it is going to be pretty apparent in the cookies. I have no idea what the "natural flavorings" might be, but I can tell you they taste pretty good!

The Crystal Farms box says on it, "1st Place, U.S. Cheese Championship, Unsalted Butter." It doesn't say if that was 2008 or 1954, though. I'm not sure what it means... but it sounds good. :-)

Land O' Lakes butter made cookies that I thought were also better than Weyauwega butter, and very close in taste to the ones made with Crystal Farms. Why? I look at the ingredients on the box: "Ingredients: Sweet Cream, Natural Flavorings." There we go with natural flavorings again!

I decided at the time that as far as I was concerned, I'd rather pay the extra money for Crystal Farms or Land 'O Lakes butter for cookies I make. If I'm not going to make cookies to be as good as they can be, I shouldn't waste my time, is my opinion! A "purist" might go with the Weyauwega butter because I am sure it's just straight butter with nothing added. I've been using Weyauwega for all these tests because it's less expensive and I'm going through a lot of butter. I have nothing whatsoever against Weyauwega butter for other purposes, but for cookies I like one of those other two the best. Given that, it seemed like a good idea to do the creaming experiment with one of the others.

Here are results for 1 cup of Crystal Farms unsalted butter creamed with 1 cup of C&H granulated sugar (same brand of sugar I've been using), starting with everything at room temperature, and creamed in my small mixing bowl. Left column is minutes, second column is weight of a level cup in grams including the cup, third column is weight of the ingredients only, and fourth column is percent increase in volume.

Starting temperature: 68.2 F.

0 - 316 - 263
1 - 259 - 205 - 28.3%
2 - 228 - 174 - 51.2%
3 - 223 - 169 - 55.6%
4 - 217 - 163 - 61.4%
5 - 212 - 158 - 66.5%
6 - 207 - 153 - 71.9%
7 - 205 - 151 - 74.2%
8 - 203 - 149 - 76.5%
9 - 202 - 148 - 77.8%
10 - 203 - 149 - 76.5%
11 - 203 - 149 - 76.5%
12 - 205 - 151 - 74.2%

Ending temperature: 78.9 F.

For the procedure and description of the rationale behind the experiement, see my post of January 19, 2010.

For comparison, I'm going to list the results of the same experiement performed with Weyauwega butter. Crystal Farms in the center column, and Weyauwega on the right, percent increases only:

0 - NA
1 - 28.3 - 18.2
2 - 51.2 - 30.7
3 - 55.6 - 40.5
4 - 61.4 - 46.9
5 - 66.5 - 52.1
6 - 71.9 - 52.9
7 - 74.2 - 56.6
8 - 76.5 - 59.5
9 - 77.8 - 61.5
10 - 76.5 - 64.6
11 - 76.5 - 60.5
12 - 74.2 - 63.5

What a difference! A way bigger difference than I expected - they are both "just butter." So how much of this difference is because I did things differently, and how much is because they are two different products? There's only one scientific way to know - do several repetitions of the same experiment with the two butters, average the numbers for the two products separately, and those averaged values tell the story. I'm not going to do that because I already know this experiment is flawed due to the pauses for measuring, and placing the butter in a cup at one-minute intervals. However, I can make a few observations.

First, I have repeatedly observed that the end-point of air incorporation into Weyauwega butter seemed to be around 64% volume increase, based on the volume not continuing to increase beyond that level. The only exception was with the chilled bowl, where briefly the air incorporation went up to around 75% before falling back to 65% or so. The Crystal Farms butter was able to incorporate significantly more air without the chilled bowl, giving about a 77% volume increase. I'm quite confident that this maximum of 77% represents a real difference between the two butters.

The only time I've seen such a rapid increase in air incorporation using the Weyauwega butter was with the chilled bowl experiment, which got to 62.7% volume increase after only two minutes. However, those are entirely different conditions. If I were to do the experiment with Crystal Farms butter in the large bowl as well, then if I also saw a much more rapid increase in volume there, I'd have a very strong indication that the more rapid incorporation of air with Crystal Farms butter is a repeatable phenomenon. I'm not going to do that because the entire experimental method is flawed anyway. These are only rough experiments to get an idea of what happens and what is worth looking at more carefully. What I will do instead of repeating this experiment is do the more drawn-out experiment of measuring volume increases only at the ends of a creaming time. I'll get detailed results with Crystal Farms butter, which I intend to use regularly, and then do one time-point with Weyauwega butter in triplicate to verify that there is a real difference in the rate of incorporation of air.

One interesting thing about the Crystal Farms results are that there is clearly a maximum volume reached at the 8-minute time point. After that the volume begins to decline. I am guessing that the temperature of the butter keeps going up because the beaters keep carrying in heat from the motor, and as the temperature increases, the maximum amount of air that can be held by the butter slowly goes down.