What's so special about Irish butter?

That it is a bit defferent from other butter you can already see by it being smoother. It is so smooth that it can be spread on bread directly when coming out of the fridge. Other butter at that state is rock hard. Must be the grass feeding.

About the only difference I can find is that the kerrygold seems to be a little creamier.

Well I live in the north so we use the pound but around 99p for 250g

Has anyone had amish roll butter? Its like $10 for a log. I'm guessing its just like everything else amish? tedious but decent quality?

There are some whipped butters that can spread directly on bread. What I got wasn't whipped and I couldn't spread it directly on bread straight out of the refrigerator. It did seem like it was softening up a bit faster.

Another great butter

I get Finlandia butter when it's on clearance. It's fucking great but I'm a poorfag and can't afford to pay that much for top-notch butter unless it's being closed out.

In my experience it ain't butter if it's spreadable straight out of the fridge. It's often branded as such but when you look at the ingredients list on the back of the pack you see very little actual butter, the rest is oils and buttermilk.

Real butter needs kept out of the fridge in a warm environment if you plan on spreading it in toast

AFAIK the butter spreadable out of the fridge is generally fractionally distilled, not whipped.

Or rather, fractionally solidified. They melt it and then let it flow past cooling tubes which solidify the highest melting temp components.

If you can't taste the difference between something that has been fermented and something that hasn't then i dunno...do you smoke?

I don't smoke. One of my brothers does. Another did, but he died an early death from lung cancer.

I could tell a mild difference tasting the butter directly, but I couldn't tell any difference when I used it on various foods.

its just marketing, people like irish things

Something about the churning process makes it better for baking (not necessarily Irish butter, just European butter in general), or at least that's what Alton Brown says in some ep of Good Eats.

I don't notice a difference in pure taste, to be honest, so I'll stick with my plain ole industrially manufactured Wal Mart butter for general purposes and only shell out for the good stuff when I'm baking.

Finlandia is good too.

Grass fed gives it a nice taste and if I remember correctly, it's 88% as opposed to 80% for American stuff and that doesn't sound like much but think about 12% diluted by water versus %20

The advertising.

It's because all of our dairy and beef is great quality. Beef factories are virtually non existent here and almost every cow is grass fed and free range. The soil quality here is great and rich in calcium and this makes nutrient rich grass for the cows. Whenever my cousins visit they all love drinking our milk,using our butter and eating beef. We sort of take it for granted here since it's been this way forever. Even the McDonald's here use free range beef.

>What's so special about Irish butter?
It allows the vendor to identify idiots willing to pay twice the amount of money for normal shit.

I prefer it to kerrygold. Honestly tho, to some extent butter is butter.

Meme as fuck, tastes like butter.

Thats what I assumed. I like the european butters when its on sale, and skip buying butter when its over $2 a pound. I looked at prices today, it was $4.99 for the safeway brand.

I'm assuming its holiday price jacking time for that kinda shit.

I like Finlandia more desu

How pleb am I for using "spreadable" butter? Ingredients are cream and canola oil.

GOAT butter coming through

It tastes a little better and might have less water in it than cheaper butter. Only use it on bread or something like that where you'll really taste it, it's kind of waste to use it for cookies and other things where it's not going to be as noticeable.

can confirm. all the high-end bakeries use this

Milk is insanely good in Ireland. I thought France had decent milk but oh, how I was wrong. It's not only about how fat the milk is neither, it actually tastes a lot better.

Our water on the other hand is basically fluoride flavoured.

I hear you have Cheddar and sausages too. Is there no end to the delicacies to be found in Ireland?

bout ye lad

It has a slightly higher fat content, so it softens a but faster, tastes a bit fattier, and has some mild differences in cooking/baking properties.

For me,it's gotta be Charville Cheddar and Clonakilty sausages.

it's not being irish or anything said itt. it's the fact that it's european style, meaning the cream was cultured and slightly fermented. gives it a more pronounced and delicious taste. regular american butter tastes a bit more like pure fat due to the lack of the culturing step

>salted butter
why tho?
kerrygold mature cheddar is pretty good

>not churning your own butter fresh weekly

Lmao plebs

Nothing in particular. It's cultured butter vs the sweet cream butter that is predominant in the US. It has a higher fat content so it's much better for baking. You can also get Finlandia, Plugra, and other imported cultured butter in the US. Locally made cultured butter is also made in the US but supermarkets usually don't stock these.

>churning with a weird mechanical contraption like this
>not doing it the babushka way, working your muscles in the process

It comes from cows that aren't fed garbage or treated like shit like in the states, so it actually provides nutrition and a slightly better taste.

>I bought a package at twice what I usually pay.

In my country butter prices soared in the last months so that the standard, no frills butter now costs more than Kerrygold, which is why I am buying Kerrygold now. 2€ for a stick of regular, absolute pisstake.

I don't see any difference between the two, except in consistency.

What are the differences? I've never heard of "cultured butter" before.

Is this why the huge megapack of butter I bought at Costco has zero flavor and turns into a puddle of water when I melt it?

How much is that in guineas per furlong?

This stuff is god-tier if you're on the U.S. west coast.

>not just using a bowl and a whisker

Stay pretentious

But seriously, homemade butter is fucking delicious.

If you're living in the US, Amish butter is the way to go. It's cheaper than kerrygold and just as good if not better.

We've got that here in MS too. I think it's the best of the uncultured butters.

memes aside, would buying heavy cream and using my kitchenaid mixer actually be worth it? Heavy cream iirc is like $2.50 for the cheap stuff, and would produce less than a pound of butter. Is the flavor really worth it?

Not them, but I've done it with the kitchenaid using a local small dairy's cream and I thought it was better. I only use it as a spread and don't cook with it. It's all going to depend on the quality of your cream. It only takes 10 minutes, so try it.

It's not special.
What you want to look for is cultured, grass-fed butter. Doesn't matter what country it comes from, actually the more local, the better, but the important part is that it's cultured and grass fed.

It tastes better and less artificial

Salted butter for eating not baking. How do you not use salted butter?

It has a stale smell to it actually. You don't get that smell from Kerry Gold.

Most EU produced butters are derived from cows with a much better diet than ones in the US, and a lower water content, so the butter is a better quality. You're paying more because it has to be imported. But you have the choice now, so count yourself lucky.

the bread and cheese or whatever are usually a bit salty anyway
noone I know uses salted butter, it's rarely available in the shops too

Came here to post this. This is what I use exclusively.

Some people make their own butter for dinner parties. They make it in the afternoon and serve it that night.

If you haven't had salted butter on newly baked bread you haven't lived user.

Around here, there is more salted than unsalted.

The reason for salting is to give it a longer shelf life.

For that matter, the Kerrygold butter in the picture above is salted. The wrapper for their unsalted butter is a different color.

t. Christina Tosi

I like roll butter, I think it has a better flavor

I've often thought about finding a way to take butter with me to restaurants so I don't have to use their shitty plastic butter (margarine).

If you ask for real butter at one restaurant in the next town, they bring you out a little plastic cup (not by measure) of the same crappy margarine they have on the table.

I could get some of the individual butter pats, but except in the mid of winter, they would be melted by the time I was ready to use them.

Grass fed butter has more omega 3 fatty acids, more vitiman K, and more CAL than butter from feed lot cattle. Also, it has a better taste.

>le one molecule away from plastic meme

They have it here in Texas, too.

I used to buy it on occasion, but not very often because the sticks would not fit in my cheap-ass butter dish.

I bought some again a couple of weeks ago and it is now the same sized sticks as the other butters.

There's plenty of grass fed dairy operatiojns around. The real problem is that it's difficult to determine which dairy products are from grass fed cows and which aren't.

>twice what I usually pay.
I buy this shit all the time because it costs LESS than what I normally pay
Where the fuck do you shop?

>that runs about 3 euros.
The fuck are you on about? It costs me $1.45 at most

just make your own

>flying to Ireland just to make butter

you don't need to go to potatoniggerland, just get grass fed milk, raw would be even better

So this. But, it better be better butter by better bovines.

Where do you live that it is so cheap?

Dude, look up bog butter. The Irish literally used to bury butter in peat swamps to preserve it.

If it's good enough for a festering swamp, it's good enough for the Irish.

>It is so smooth that it can be spread on bread directly when coming out of the fridge
This is not true

It tastes good because the cows are grass fed. Grass fed cows arent malnourished and therefore there byproducts taste better.

>grass fed cows aren't malnourished

Dude, don't be ridiculous. I'm all about pastured livestock, but even free ranged cattle can become malnourished. It all depends on the rancher, and the weather.

>but even free ranged cattle can become malnourished
Of course.

I think user's point was that a cow that only gets industrial feed has a far less varied diet than one that free-ranges.

It definitely has a less varied diet, but livestock feed is extremely high in nutrients. Not all good, since it lacks variation and natural occurring vitamins and minerals, but still, it's highly nutritious. I grew up on a ranch, and we pastured our cattle, they were always free range, but in winter (or in a severe drought), we'd have to supplement their diet with store bought feed. It was a "rich mix", which included grains and molasses, as well as "cubes", which were usually alfalfa based. Plus hay.
You'll never meet a stock rancher that doesn't pray for rain and hate harsh winters.

Too bad grass fed butter is a seasonal thing. Or at least it sure feels like it. I imagine Hay prices are going to go up substantially in the next few years (barring inflation as the cause).

Hay prices have already been through the roof in areas where there's been drought going on the past years. People have been having to go in together and make "hay runs" to other states at exorbitant prices.

>Not all good, since it lacks variation and natural occurring vitamins and minerals

That's the point, really. Farm feed is optimized for price and hitting all the main macronutrient numbers, the correct amount of protein, etc. But it is certainly lacking in some nutritional aspects. It's engineered mainly for cost and production rate (how fast the animals put on weight). Things like flavor of the animal's meat or milk are secondary concerns, if they are concerns at all.

>>It was a "rich mix", which included grains and molasses, as well as "cubes", which were usually alfalfa based. Plus hay.
It sounds like you guys were doing a good job. But keep in mind that not all ranchers or farmers would necessarily go to the same level of effort as you did.

In Canada there has been an increase of butter consumption by about 3% across the nation and it has made the Dairy Industry blow a gasket. They're dumping so much skim milk its ridiculous. They were warned 6 years ago and they laughed it off.

Now they're scrambling to have the infrastructure to produce the butter and are letting in more and more European dairy products.

Fucking government/subsidies are ruining good things. People are fined in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for being over productive/violating the mandated quota limits.

but pasteurized livestock tastes disgusting

Always some thick paddy showing up in threads asking about Ireland just to be like "jaysus lads I dunno, its just normal to me. But sure then again I am from Ireland hahaha"
At least we're not a laughing stock like the britthurts.

Tesco vintage cheddar is better than any of that shite, charleville in particular is waxier than fuck.
Or ardagh reserve cheddar is the stuff if you're in aldi.

I think I'm going to buy a cow.

I too buy country crock

Is it better than land o lakes? What about that smart balance with extra virgin olive oil?

Anyone in the West coast area? What's the best brand of butter to buy here? Currently I buy Kirkland's butter, is that any good?

No. Just got buy Kerrygold. Its available everywhere and is the best non locally sourced option.

Will I taste the difference?