Yes, there's a difference in butters. In America, the standard is 80% butterfat & 20% water & milk solids available in either salted or unsalted. There are also what's known as "European Butters". I use Plugra (made by Kellers Creamery) & it's 82% butterfat. The extra 2% makes a noticeable difference in sauces, cookies (especially shortbread), cakes, & as a table butter. Another Euro-type butter that I like is Horizon Organic European-Style but it's hard to find in my area.

/tricia

Thanks triciae! I use the Horizon Organic, and currently have Challenge Origanic in the fridge, not sure I have seen the Horizon European style either.
Where did you get the percentages of fat for the butters you use? And most importantly - do you adjust the amount by type of butter used? Is one better vs. the other (fat content wise) for pastry vs. say cookies or sauces?

As I understand it, "regular" butter has 80% butter fat. The remaining 20% is water and milk solids. European Style butter, such as Plugra, has 2.5% more butter fat. They are also made in small batches, and are smoother and creamier than "regular" butter.

This translates into less moisture in the European Style butters and (according to the box of Plugra European Style Butter) "cakes are supposed to rise higher, cookies are crisper, and pie crusts or croissants are flakier."

I'd like to point out, it's not JUST the butter that creates those qualities in baked goods, but the mixing and and other ingredients, and they can be just as good using "regular" butter. I'd also say that tiny bit of moisture (or lack of it) doesn't make that much difference, comparing how people measure ingredients so differently from person to person to begin with.

I doubt that most people would find all that much difference between the European Style butters and "regular". If you were doing a side-by-side test, there would only be marginal differences. Especially when people are still trying to pawn off butter-flavored Crisco or margarine in baked goods instead of real butter. As a foods judge at fairs, that's where you'll find a significant difference....not the European Style Butter and "regular" butter.

-Grainlady

Ya know, I haven't really adjusted amounts but I do notice that cookies & cakes rise more when I use a higher butterfat butter like Plugra. My biscuits are also better with Plugra. Since there's a small difference in water content it will alter a recipe slightly but I've not seen a need for adjustments...I just like the finished product better. A couple years ago, when I was on my "better butter" kick...I wrote to the creameries & asked about their various butters. I got the percentages of butterfat from their responses. Cabot also makes a 'Euro-style' butter but, again, it's hard to find for me locally...it's probably widely available outside tiny Mystic since Cabot's a New England company.

I use half Plugra & half lard when I make pie crust. I don't make pies frequently so when I do...well, we splurge! Yum, yum...
/tricia

Cook's Illustrated's findings...take it or leave it. Unfortunately, while Land O Lakes is all over the place, I have yet to see their Ultra Creamy on the shelves.

There's been plenty of hype about the merits of "premium" butters (often called European-style butters), touted for their creamy texture and high fat content compared with regular butter. In the past, when the test kitchen conducted blind taste tests of both styles, tasters found only subtle differences when the butters were sampled plain (simply spread on toast), and those nuances disappeared entirely when they were used in cooking. Was our panel missing something?

It's when we hunkered down to calculate the percentages ourselves (dividing the amount of fat per serving by the 1-tablespoon serving size) that a clearer picture began to emerge. Initially, we were puzzled to find, as you did, that most manufacturers don't list fat percentage on the packagingÂespecially given that fat content is a key selling point. Even more surprising, the fat content of every butter we foundÂfrom the ubiquitous Land O' Lakes to the fanciest French beurreÂfell between 11 grams and 12 grams per serving. Just a 1-gram difference. What's more, many of the so-called premium butters (including President, Kerrygold, Lurpak, and perhaps the best known, Plugrá) listed just 11 grams of fat per serving. How could it be that these self-proclaimed "premium" butters contained the same amount of fat as the generic (cheap) supermarket brands?

As it turns out, it all boils down to U.S. Food and Drug Administration labeling laws, which allow manufacturers to disclose fat content in grams rounded to the nearest whole number. That means a butter with "11 grams" of fat may contain between 80 percent and 82 percent fat (82 percent fat is generally considered the minimum fat content for a premium butter). No wonder our tasters noticed hardly any difference between cheap butter and premium butter in our battery of blind taste testsÂthe difference comes down to less than two percentage points.

If you want a higher-fat butter, choose one with 12 grams of fat per serving rather than 11Âwhich is guaranteed to be at least a few percentage points higher in fat content. In a 2004 tasting, our tasting panel liked the rich flavor and creamy texture of Land O' Lakes "Ultra Creamy" variety (which has 12 grams of fat).

Try the Irish butter just for a treat some time. Delicious.

Speaking of butter....

How much do you pay for a pound of butter in your area? Here, it's anywhere from $4.59 to $5.25 a pound!

I got one of the Irish butters to try, Kerrigold, and couldn't taste any difference between that and the Challenge butter we usually get.

If the difference is between 80 and 82% fat content, that is about .16 oz out of an 8 ounce stick of butter - or about one tsp more fat and less milk solids and water. Given our earlier discussion on measurement accuracy, that's probably less than then the variation one gets measuring the other liquids going into the recipe so one wouldn't need to adjust the recipe.

Wouldn't it be less than half a teaspoon more fat?
A stick of butter is 8 Tablespoons, which equals 24 teaspoons.
Two percent of that is .48 teaspoons.

On homade bread, I notice a difference...in cooking, not at all.
as cloud says it's very very little....if I think 1t easpoon of fat will make a difference in my pie crust, I will add one more teaspoon of the butter and decrease the water I add by a smidge.
In cooking and baking the slightest differences can come from things like the atmospher and the amount of flour you throw down on the counter for rolling that it's not a matter of worrying about 2% difference in butter fat in brands of butter.
And if you are making short bread using a pound of butter....that amounts to about 1 tablespoon.
So if I thought it mattered I would toss in another pat of butter.
Un salted European style butter is wonderful on fresh bread, but I won't waste it in cooking.
Linda C

I stock up on Land O Lakes whenever there's a sale, usually @2/$5.00. Sometime I buy the store brand (Spartan) when it's 2/$4.00. Have used Plugra and Tillamonk, can't say I can honestly tell a difference. What I really like is the stuff I make. I can get organic high butterfat heavy cream from local cows at about $5.00 a qt. so when I want a treat, I make my own. YUM.....

Nancy

Acme store brand butter is $3.99 a pound here in NJ. Land O' Lakes and Kellers are sometimes on sale for $2.50 a pound (2 for $5 but you don't have to buy 2).

Cloudy - guess two clouds are better then one. You are right, I was doing the calculation on 8 oz when a stick is 4 oz. The difference for a 4 oz stick would be about a half teaspoon.

I use Costco Butter as a primary staple butter and it is decent and we like it. My favorite butters, that I pay a higher price for are Challenge or Tillamook when I can get them. Costco does carry an Irish Butter that is very, very rich, but it isn't my favorite.

The very best butter both of us have ever had was in Colorado. We went to Breckenridge in the summer for a music festival a few years ago and the bed and breakfast we stayed at had the most deliciously creamy buttery butter to spread on our toast and she used it in I think everything. I asked the woman who did the cooking what she used. It was an dairy from Denver that supplied them. I think it was called Royal Crown or something like that.

Since then, I have found that if you can get a local dairy that has a store, their butter is usually pretty good. When we went to Amarillo, Texas to visit with some family who used to live there, we used Braum's Butter. It was delicious and I really noticed how good my eggs fried in it were!

I am not a big baker, so I am not sure what the difference is in a higher quality butter does to a recipe, but I do notice the difference with lower quality 'watery' butters. They will wreck a perfectly good recipe!

I actually live in Amarillo, TX, and I usually buy Challenge butter...here it's about 3.19 a pound unless they put it on sale for 2.50. Yesterday, I happened to be at Sam's Club for something else, and they had butter in the one-pound bricks...four of them (either unsalted or salted) were $6.68...for all four! It says first quality and gradeAA...do you think it really is? I want to try to make my pound cake with it, and it takes an entire pound to make one...I guess it's worth a try! Wow, was that cheap! Braum's butter is great and I haven't bought it in a long time, mostly because I forget to run by there. Their milk, though, is only $3.29 a gallon..and we love their milk. Maybe I ought to make a run over there today! I bake all the time and only use butter, so I go through it pretty quickly. The dairy in Denver really IS great..Royal Crest, I think. We got our milk and dairy delivered in a box on the front porch. LOVED it!

Trader Joe's butter is $2.69 a pound and I buy it sometimes.
My local supermarket, Giant, has store-brand butter that I like better than Land-o-Lakes or Kellers. It's often on sale at 3 lbs. for $5, and then I stock up.

My cookbooks are in storage except for Cookwise which I recently bought. In reading about pie crusts it seems fat is very important. I bought some lard at a street market and would like to make a part lard part butter pie crust.
Cookwise has one which includes 12 tablespoons butter with 2 tablespoons lard (can 2 tablespoons really make a difference?). I would like to change the ratio to be closer to 2/3 butter 1/3 lard.
She says:
10 tablespoons of butter (81% fat) = 8 tablespoons of fat

All the recipes for crust in her book (there are more than several pie crust recipes) seem to have a wide variety of ingredients, or some of the simple ones use 2 types of flour. The simplest Flaky Butter Crust is all butter - can I adapt it? How do I do the math? (yes I am stupider than a 5th grader when it comes to math) am I overthinking this?

Lard has a larger fat crystal than shortening or butter, and that's one reason it works so well in pastry.

The trick to pastry... for both tenderness AND flakiness

Cut half the cold fat into the flour mixture until it is finely mixed - this creates tenderness and coats the flour to prevent hydration from penetrating the flour which prevents the gluten from forming. Keep the other 1/2 of the fat in cold 1/4-inch cubes and add it, but keep mixing to a minimum, keeping the blobs of butter throughout the mixture fairly large. When the blobs of fat melt, it releases steam which pushes the layers of pastry apart, which yields flakiness.

Another tip... Using a low-gluten flour - cake or pastry flour or a southern all-purpose flour (White Lily or Martha White) will help prevent tough pastry that is caused by too much gluten development. If you do use National Brand all-purpose (Pillsbury or Gold Medal), and it's even higher gluten cousin, King Arthur All-Purpose, add a little more fat to help coat the flour and prevent gluten development.

Every step of pastry making is keyed towards the least amount of gluten development - so start with a low-gluten flour to begin with.

-Grainlady

Thanks Grainlady - I don't think I've ever seen White Lily. I've seen Martha White cornbread mixes but not flour but now that I know its lower gluten I'll double check.

I buy the butter Costco sells. 4lbs for 6.99 right now (or it was a week ago when I bought it. It's salted..however they are carrying an Organic..but I've not bought it yet..I think I'll get some when I go on Friday. I believe it's the same price as above but for half the amount. 2lbs.

Butter around here (San Diego County) is cheapest when I see it on sale at $2.49/lb. My mom brought us about 5 lbs that she got at Fry's (Arizona) for 1.00/lb on special sale - it's in the freezer now. (She also found sugar on sale for 99c for a 5 lb bag, which is unheard of around here.)

DonnaR/CA

I've never bought the expensive butter so I can't compare them... But, I can tell the difference between a butter that has 'Sweet Cream' on the label and one that doesn't...

As for the price around here, I picked up 2 pounds of Land O Lakes for $4. a couple of weeks ago at Meijers...

Rita

ritaotay - Meijers! I like Meijers too, you must be in the Midwest.