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Thanks to nutritionists and health experts giving fats the much-deserved thumbs-up towards leading a wholesome and sustainable life, butter is now back in fashion. As people who cook would swear, butter truly does make everything better in more ways than one. There can never be too much butter in anything – sweet or savoury and more is always welcome. If anything, butter is the desired texture and consistency that we crave for when we cook most things because God knows that anything steeped in this beloved diary product is only going to be delicious. Let’s take a look at the various kinds of butter to understand how each one has their own unique characteristic and flavour.
Clarified Butter
Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons
Butter that is devoid of milk solids and is purely just composed of fat, is essentially clarified butter. With a higher smoking point and longer shelf life than cultured butter, clarified butter has a nutty flavour and is one of the best cooking mediums to use, due to its richness. Clarified butter becomes grainy when cooled and forms a solid but soft mass, making it ideal to apply heat and use instead of purposes like spreading over toast or baking with.
Cultured Butter
Image Credits: Cultured Guru
Handmade butter that is freshly churned from milk curds, cultured butter is fresh butter with a slight tang to it. With a slightly fermented flavour compared to most other varieties of butter. Typically, cultured butter is made from ‘grass-fed’ cows and tends to have a mellow vegetal flavour to it. Ideal for spreading on things as well as cooking, cultured butter is known to be packed with healthy fats and supposed to be good for the bones.
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Compound Butter
Image Credits: Jernej Kitchen
Compound butter is usually flavoured butter that is packed with fresh and dry herbs, garlic and lemon zest or sweeter ingredients like cinnamon, brown sugar and nutmeg. Compound butter tastes best when used to flavour things that rely heavily on being flavoured – think bread dough, pastry dough, potatoes and even meats – and can be used to cook as well as ‘finish’ a dish by adding it right at the end, for maximum flavour impact.
Pasteurised Butter
Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons
When milk is heated at high temperatures in factory units, the enzymes that are active in the milk tend to be destroyed, thus extending the shelf life of the fat that is produced from the milk, which is then churned into butter. Pasteurised butter is also denser in texture and can come in salted and unsalted variations. It is also one of the more affordable types of butter compared to the rest due to it being mass-produced in factories.
