Great Canadian Butter Tasting
by Ivy Knight

I love butter, I grew up with butter. I once spent a few miserable months with margarine and it almost killed me. My girlfriends and I had just left PEI for the big city of Vancouver, each with around $100 bucks in our pockets. We were just on the cusp of 19, ready to shake the red dust of the Island off our heels and become sexy, sophisticated city slickers. We all got jobs at Metrotown Mall in Burnaby, we worked in retail.

Now I've said that cooks get paid poorly, no one bitches more than I do about that, but they get to eat for free and learn a trade in return. Retail workers in malls get paid poorly, eat in food courts under fluorescent lighting and they learn nothing except that they are too broke to buy anything in the store they are trapped in eight hours a day. My girlfriends and I were consistently broke and they ganged up on me and voted against butter on our first grocery trip. These girls had been raised on margarine, to them there was no difference between butter and margarine. Butter was just a more expensive version of the same product.

A recent issue of Saveur magazine was dedicated to butter. The editors listed their top 30 butters, including a few from Ontario and Quebec. Seeing that, I decided to ask some of my industry friends to pick a favourite butter and get together for a butter tasting. Mark Cutrara was one of the first people I invited and he offered the use of Cowbell's dining room for the tasting. An appropriate setting I thought since I'd had the most in-depth butter experience of my life in that restaurant. I did a brief stint at Cowbell when it first opened and one of my first jobs was to make butter. It really doesn't matter that I'm a cook who's been making things from scratch for years, I still thought that seemed like an impossible task. How do you make butter? Don't you need a laboratory like setting? A rural location? A shower cap? White rubber boots?

I'm an idiot, obviously. Mark pulled out some litres of Harmony Organic 35% cream, from Bornholm, Ontario and told me to dump it into the giant mixer and over-whip it until it separated. The cream whipped into perfect soft peaks, then shiny stiff peaks and then separated quite violently, the fat clinging together and the buttermilk splooging all over my face and the walls. Quite the bovine money shot. I then rinsed the butter with ice water a few times, salted it and let it drain to get rid of all the buttermilk. Then I rolled it up in plastic wrapped cylinders and it was ready to be used. Compared to beating a wooden churn all day, making butter these days is a very quick process, the cleanup being the longest part of the operation.

Mark planned to submit his house-made butter for the competition. The other guests bringing butter included Jason Bangerter, head chef at Auberge de Pommier, David Chrystian, head chef at Chez Victor and Mark Rozender, owner of Thin Blue Line cheese shop. To add some more trained palates to the group I also invited my editor Malcolm Jolley and sommelier wunderkind Jamie Drummond from Jamie Kennedy's restuarants.

Jason brought Beurre Ancestral from Fromagerie Le Detour in Quebec. This butter is made with pasteurized cow's milk and comes from the cheesemakers who invented Clandestin. Mark brought L'Ancetre Bio Organic Salt Butter from Quebec, one of the butters chosen for Saveur's top 30 (the other Canadian picks were Lactantia Light Butter and Stirling Unsalted Butter from Ontario and Liberte Goat Milk Butter from Quebec). David and I both shook things up with some unexpected choices. David showed up with the most generic butter available in Canada, made by a gigantic food producer, and my contribution was one that Kerry and I fell in love with during our vegan fling – Soy Garden! It's technically not a butter at all but a "buttery spread" made from soy and olive oil.

As the butters arrived at Cowbell I quickly snuck them out of sight and into the kitchen where I whisked off their wrappers and mashed them up to disguise their shape. I put each butter in a dish and set them out on a table, each one signified by a letter from A-E.

A. Cowbell

B. Beurre Ancestral

C. Soy Garden

D. Generic

E. L'Ancetre Bio Organic

Malcolm uncorked some "buttery" Chardonnay he'd brought and I cut some bread. We were ready to taste some butter. They varied quite a bit in colour - from a pale, creamy yellow to a bright, almost orange shade. Everyone tasted seriously for a few minutes and then we compared notes.

Everyone found A to be fairly mild and subtle. Jamie thought it was possibly the most commercial, while Jason found it to be very creamy and Marc thought it was a bit fruity (but not in a Big Gay Al kind of way). Kerry found it creamy as well and echoed all of us when he said it needed salt.

The first thing I thought of when I tasted B was beurre noisette and Jason Bangerter felt the same. David said "who brought the foie gras fat?" when he tasted it. Malcolm tasted "buttery topping", Marc got hints of artichoke and caramel, for Jamie it was "almost cheesy".

I was nervous about what people would think of C. Had they spotted the fake?

Mark found it slightly sour like it might have gone off. It reminded Jason of olive oil and for David it was too cheese-like. Marc found it complex and Malcolm found it tangy. Everyone agreed that it had the grassiest taste of all the contenders. Now, if you were thinking dairy you would taste that grassiness and picture a meadow of cows, not rows of ancient olive trees.

D reminded Jason of the butters of Normandy and Jamie thought that it had "a nice elegance". Mark found it to be very similar to A. Malcolm, Marc, Kerry and I found it by turns to be bland, subtle and light.

Finally E to me was the butteriest of them all, Kerry found it boring, Jason found it dense and Jamie said "it's similar to what I have in the fridge at home". Mark liked it's balance of salt and sweet and David picked this one as his favourite adding that "A and D could be used for almost anything while B and C are more 'statement' butters."

Now it was time to tell these guys what butters they'd been tasting and hope they didn't get too pissed that I'd slipped what was essentially a margarine into the lineup.

When I revealed which butter was which everyone was shocked, but none more than Malcolm. He was astounded by the news of the soya/olive oil imposter, his feelings echoing those of Stephen Rea's after that famous scene from "The Crying Game". I told Malcolm to go take a shower a la Jim Carey in "Ace Ventura".

After the hubbub died down Jason added, "C was a surprise. No one was expecting an impostor so I think it threw us for a loop. As it became more tempered it was really olive intense and it should have clicked that it was not dairy."

I took home samples of each butter and Kerry made pate sucree with three he chose at random – Cowbell's, Marc's and the vegan faker. The final product, apple galettes, came out flaky and delicious. The butteriest of the crusts were the ones made with Mark and Marc's butters, though the vegan was excellent as well.

So, the next time you go to the grocery store go ahead and buy the cheapest butter – I doubt that there will be a discernible difference between all the generic brands. With the money you save you can go ahead and buy some artisanal butter from Quebec. You may not be able to find a huge difference in taste, but you'll feel more virtuous about eating butter. Use it for rich pastry creations, stuff it under the skin of a chicken, melt it over lobster, get inspired by Brando and rub it on your nether regions. Go nuts, this is a luxury ingredient, so treat it like one. Trot it out for your guests and tell them the provenance. It was made with care, it wasn't mass produced and you bought it which means you care; you're a discerning gourmand who knows how to treat yourself and your guests. More than that, if you care about farmers, local ingredients and slow food, artisanal and organic products, and I know that you do (because why the hell else would you be reading an article about butter?), then you should be buying these small-batch butters.

Some more buttery notes...
David had dinner at Cowbell on Tuesday night and loved the house butter, "their bread is exceptional, so the combination of the bread and butter was really nice and dinner was fantastic." Mark has started adding a little more salt to his butter since the tasting.

Jason is now putting Beurre Ancestral on his cheese plate at Auberge De Pommier. "Guests are loving it and I'm actually trying to get some of the cheese that creates the butter to do a side by side tasting."

Anthony Walsh is using a "killer Quebecois butter" on the Canoe Blooms menu on April 19th. Canoe only opens on Saturday night twice a year – one for Comfort and Joy in December and again for Blooms in April. The 5 course menu showcases ingredients from Simcoe County, Clover Roads, Cookstown, Century Farm and Pelee Island.

The Thin Blue Line carries both of the Quebec butters from the tasting for only $8 each. I know, enough with Quebec already! Well, all you locavores can chill out because Marc tells me he's looking forward to getting some Ontario butter soon. "Cole Snell at Provincial Fine Foods has located a cheesemaker in North Bay who is starting to make butter." So keep an eye on his shop in Roncesvalles for that.

Michael Schmidt is up on seven charges just for giving customers real milk. He goes to court this month because he sold raw milk to customers who wanted raw milk. He's a farmer, do you know how much lawyers cost? He's been fighting this fight for twenty f***ing years! Show the government that you foodies out there aren't a bunch of pretentious pussies. Show them that you won't settle for generic. Wipe the UPC symbol off your palate and demand real food.

More Great Canadian Tastings are being planned, if you're interested in participating or have a novel idea for a tasting let me know and you could be a judge: click here to send me a note.

Read more of Ivy Knight at gremolata.com/ivyknight.htm
or contact her directly at ladyslenderlegs@gmail.com

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