When I was growing up, my family almost never used butter since mother was under the assumption that margarine was somehow healthier. My mother would send my father on grocery store errands, and he would return having "accidently" purchased real butter. We would pounce on it immediately, and slathered it on our bread, lest my mother force him to return it. When I moved into my first apartment, I declared it a margarine-free zone, and when my mother first visited and pointed this out, I promptly gave her a lecture on the carcinogenic properties of hydrogenated vegetable oil. When I visit them now, I'm glad to see real butter sitting next to the eggs in my parents' refrigerator. My father never fails to thank me.
Now that the weather is cooling, I've been obsessed with use of butter in baking various pastry crusts - short crust, pâte sucrée, puff pastry, pâte feuilletée, pie crust, pâte brisée, and so forth. In the span of a week, I've made four tarts (raspberry, blueberry, meyer lemon cream, and tarte tatin). A pumpkin pie may soon be in the works, although I feel that a decent pie crust involves using half butter and half lard or shortening, and I want to avoid using hydrogenated fats. Like Anne, the idea of rendering my own leaf lard fascinates me, but I haven't yet determined whether I would undertake that project.
I've been using Plugra since my wedding cake baker extolled its virtues to me five years ago, and especially after discovering that it was only $2.89 for a pound at my local Trader Joe's. Because of its lower water content, Plugra tends more pliable and flexible than other butters, and because it has less milk solids, it does not burn as easily. However, it does have a nutty flavor, which I happen to like, but I've been curious to see how a recipe will taste using butter with a different flavor. Land O'Lakes, my supermarket standby, has a wonderful sweet flavor, but it tends crumble when broken up. I've tried Straus butter, but it had an even nuttier flavor than Plugra. The Cheese Board sells sweet butter that appears to be made by the collective, and I haven't yet branched out into Vermont butters, or Normandy butters. I've heard my boss mouth platitudes about the demi-sel (half-salted) butter of his youth in Brittany, but I always use sweet butter, especially in baking. I saw raw butter at the natural foods store, but didn't want to shell out ten bucks right then since I wouldn't have had the time to make another batch of puff pastry before the butter expired. I thought about making butter with the raw cream I bought recently, but I wasn't sure how long it would last before it went bad. I also remembered reading not long ago in one of Jeffrey Steingarten's brilliant Vogue columns that most commercial butters are cultured for flavor, and the butter he made without the culture was rather flavorless. Sadly, I could not locate this article but I did find this one. What butters do you prefer?