A Few European Style Butters

A Few European Style Butters

Well, it's been a heck of a week at work. A heck of a couple of weeks, actually. Cuts into the cookie-baking time, you know? If anyone has been eagerly awaiting new reports on cookie experiments, sorry, I didn't get a whole lot of baking time in.

But I did get a little time in since I finished the temperature experiments with Crystal Farms butter.

Earlier today I posted information about European style butters I found. Actually, I've been able to make cookies with three of them since I bought them. I thought I might as well give my partial report now, and then another report after I've finished with the last two. The differences in flavor are bound to be subtle, so as I make each batch I'm freezing a few cookies, and I'll do a full comparative taste test when I'm done with all five brands.

For my tests, I am baking the butter cookies after warming the butter to about 74.5 degrees. This is a pretty stringent test. Of Weyauwega, Crystal Farms, and Land o' Lakes brand regular unsalted butters, the Land o' Lakes butter is the only one that was able to make good cookies when the butter was warmed to that temperature. The European butters are too expensive for me to want to do many experiments with using the whole list of brands, and if I were to select one experiment to separate the men from the boys, it has to be one that causes many experiments with regular butter to fail. So, 74.5 degrees it is.

The first one I tried was Crystal Farms European Style Butter. When I unwrapped it, the aroma was pleasant. When I open Crystal Farms regular butter, it smells like the artificial butter flavoring you get on popcorn. I actually don't like that smell very much - it seems like an obvious artifical aroma. The European Style Butter has the same aroma, but somehow it didn't seem so raw. That's pretty subjective - could be my nose wasn't working as well that day, too. Anyway, that's what I thought. I made the cookies, and they came out just great. In other words, they were superior to the cookies made with regular Crystal Farms Unsalted Butter, because those weren't so great when the butter had been warmed to 74.5 degrees. I thought that they were equal to the cookies I made with Land o' Lakes butter. I had a few of the Land o' Lakes cookies sitting there, and I did a little taste test. I could tell no difference between the cookies made with Crystal Farms European Style Butter and Land o' Lakes regular butter, either in texture or flavor. So, although the cookies were excellent, I didn't see a reason based on this to pay extra for the Crystal Farms European Style Butter, which is almost twice as expensive. That's not to say the extra fat might not be a benefit in some other recipe! But I didn't see a difference in my quick taste tests.

The next butter I tried was Wuthrich European Style Butter. The 'u' actually has a German umlaut over it, leading one to think it might actually be imported from Germany, but actually it's made right here in Greenwood, Wisconsin by Grassland Dairy Products Inc. Apparently their regular Unsalted Wuthrich Butter won the U.S. Championship at some point. I'm sure it's good butter. When I warmed it to almost 75 degrees, the butter became very soft indeed. I thought maybe the cookies would be bad, but actually they came out great. I didn't notice anything in particular about the flavor, but it didn't seem unusual. The cookies seem as good as the Land o' Lakes cookies, but I won't know for sure until I do the direct comparison taste test in a week or so.

The third butter I tried was Plugra European Style Butter. Plugra is made in the US by Keller's Creamery. Their Web site lists a production plant in Texas. Keller's also makes Breakstone Sour Cream, which a Russian friend of mine said is "the best," meaning the most like the sour cream she remembers from Russia. Nothing wrong with the food! However, it didn't pass my stress test. The cookies baked on the Wilton Everglide pan were extremely pitted, and there were minor signs of pitting even on the cookies baked on the Williams-Sonoma Goldtouch Commercial Quality Cookie Sheet. Interestingly, the butter clearly had a different quality to it from any other I've used. Even at 75 degrees it wasn't remotely goopy. It was certainly soft, but if the degree of softness of Land o' Lakes is a 6 at 75 degrees, and of Wuthrich European Style is an 8, the Plugra was only about a 3, about the same as normal butters at seventy. I would have said that sign portended well for the results, but the butter just doesn't work out that well for butter cookies, whatever the reason. I wonder if that means it's important for the butter to become soft beyond some certain point to be able to make good cookies?

And here's my standard measurements for these butters. The temperature tends to fall after the initial measurement because the room temperature is below what I'm heating the butter to. There are big differences in volume increase during creaming, but I don't see any correlations between this data and the way the cookies come out.

CRYSTAL FARMS UNSALTED EUROPEAN STYLE BUTTER

Starting Temperature:
74.2 F.

Ending Temperature:
73.2 F. (change of -1.0)

Weight of creamed butter/sugar, not including weight of cup:
220g

Percent volume increase during creaming:
17.2%

Weight of dough after mixing, not including weight of cup:
229g

Percent volume increase during through mixing step:
7.9%


WUTHRICH EUROPEAN STYLE BUTTER

Starting Temperature:
74.7 F.

Ending Temperature:
72.2 F. (change of -2.5)

Weight of creamed butter/sugar, not including weight of cup:
197g

Percent volume increase during creaming:
31.0%

Weight of dough after mixing, not including weight of cup:
238g

Percent volume increase during through mixing step:
3.8%


PLUGRA EUROPEAN STYLE BUTTER

Starting Temperature:
74.7 F.

Ending Temperature:
73.2 F. (change of -1.5)

Weight of creamed butter/sugar, not including weight of cup:
198g

Percent volume increase during creaming:
30.3%

Weight of dough after mixing, not including weight of cup:
231g

Percent volume increase during through mixing step:
6.9%