Everything’s better with butter

June 21, 2014 by
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butter

Butter is back. From gracing the cover of Time Magazine to starting new crazes (getting whipped into coffee), butter has returned to glory, overcoming its former reputation as one of the “bad fats.” Now indexed magazine Food & Wine sings the praises of butter with five unexpected foods we should be buttering.

The first item on Food & Wine’s list is smoked salmon. Skip the cream cheese and use softened butter instead; to give it more zip, add mustard and lemon zest to the butter. Next up, they recommend doubling down on dairy – using butter and cheese together. The magazine notes that “Gabrielle Hamilton serves brown bread that’s both buttered and topped with Garrotxa, a Catalonian goat’s milk cheese, at Prune in New York.” Tomato sauce takes the third slot. Adding butter “instead of olive oil in tomato sauce will smooth out the acidity of the tomatoes.” Radishes and burgers round out the list. 

Of course for some of us, butter never fell from grace, and it’s heartening to see that the u-turn on butter has meant good news for the industry, particularly in Ireland. There, the main butter distributor, IDB, is finding it difficult to meet the increased demand for its flagship product, Kerrygold butter. Now IDB, “which markets nearly half of the national dairy output on behalf of dairy processors, has announced plans to build a new butter packing facility in Mitchelstown, Co Cork.”

What’s your favorite use for butter?

Photo by Darcie Boschee

Category: Antipasto

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8 Comments

  • wester  on  June 21, 2014

    Thin slices of butter on raw ham is lovely. Weirdly, I found this combination at the fig & raw ham combination in the flavour thesaurus. And I have recently started using butter on my radishes. Leite's culinaria has a lovely butter dressing that's great on tomatoes as well.

  • Rinshin  on  June 22, 2014

    Butter and radishes. I've been doing this too for a long time. Was it Julia who did this? Somebody I was following a while back.

  • lesorelle  on  June 24, 2014

    On radishes with sea salt — classic, sublime, where every ingredient matters.

  • pokarekare  on  June 26, 2014

    I have to admit that I love butter with everything! Buttery mashes, buttery rice, buttery pasta, buttery radish or tomato sandwiches …….

  • Bloominanglophile  on  June 26, 2014

    I picked up the habit of using butter instead of mayonnaise on certain sandwiches from the Europeans. I remember lovely ham and cheese baguettes with butter in France. Here at home I also make salami sandwiches with butter. Butter is also a "secret" ingredient included in some recipes for pesto, making it a little more luscious and easier to coat pasta.

  • porterbl1  on  June 26, 2014

    Have you tried bulletproof coffee? Really delicious, and it's creamy not fatty.

    I love all things butter!

  • Jane  on  June 26, 2014

    I never gave up on butter so I'm delighted it is now deemed a "good fat" – not that the "bad fat" label ever put me off. Yesterday I made radish butter for the first time – the recipe is from Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern, Very simple, just radishes chopped finely in processor, mixed with good butter (I used Kerrygold) and some Maldon sea salt. Wonderful.

  • AliciaWarren  on  June 27, 2014

    There's no doubt that butter is delicious, but where's the evidence that it's better for you than, say, olive oil?

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