Organic Valley Unsalted European Style Cultured Butter

Taxes done! In celebration, I baked some cookies!

Actually, I baked the last cookies with European style butter. This last butter was the most expensive butter I bought, Organic valley Unsalted European Style Cultured Butter, at $7.38 per pound. Better be pretty darned good, huh?

This is another butter that showed a pretty good consistency even at 75 F, not at all on the verge of melting. The cookies I baked on the Williams-Sonoma pan were incredibly good! Melt-in-your-mouth to an extreme. The cookies baked on the Wilton pan aren't as good. Baked for seven minutes on the Wilton pan, they were a little soft, not fully baked. At seven-and-a-half minutes, the four cookies at the center of the pan were OK, but the eight cookies at the edge were over-baked and a bit hard. At eight minutes, a couple of the cookies showed pitting, and most were significantly overbaked.

The cookies on the Wilton pan were somewhat spread, but not too bad. The ones on the Williams-Sonoma pan were higher than usual, really just about perfect, to my mind. I think some of the cookies with Land o' Lakes butter creamed for six minutes looked about like this, but these were perhaps a tad higher.

Before I do the taste test with all five kinds of European style butter, I need to make one more batch with Land o' Lakes butter to compare against. If I don't have time to do that tomorrow, it will be on Monday. If Land o' Lakes is pretty close, I wouldn't ever spend $7.38/pound for butter again, but if this is clearly "the best," I'll report it and people can all make their own decision.

Here are the numbers for the Organic Valley Unsalted European Style Cultured Butter:

Starting Temperature:
74.9 F.

Ending Temperature:
74.2 F. (change of -0.7)

Weight of creamed butter/sugar, not including weight of cup:
201g

Percent volume increase during creaming:
28.3%

Weight of dough after mixing, not including weight of cup:
230g

Percent volume increase during through mixing step:
5.7%