CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
1
I’ve watched regular butter (say, Land O’Lakes, not Aldi) go from $3/lb to $4 to $5 and now as of this week at my regular grocer (a bit upscale) they just switched out the price tabs from $5.90 to $6.50 per pound.
The Walmart down the street seems to follow price trends lagging and also not quite as high as the more name-brand grocers. It’s had the LO’L at $5/lb for a few weeks so I expect them to jump up closer to (but not as high as) the regular grocers.
In another thread I mentioned Dan Souza’s video on making butter from cultured cream (add a bit of buttermilk and let it sit on the counter for up to 7 days, then make the butter). I tried it and my wife and kids think it’s very good, significantly better than the LO’L butter. Dan explains that letting it culture for several days increases the amount of natural diacetyl which is the compound added to microwave popcorn and some other packaged foods to provide that buttery taste and smell.
I can’t find regular pasteurized cream at any of my local stores, only the UHT-pasteurized stuff that Dan said to avoid if you can. But it still turned out very nice. As an aside - all the paneer recipes I used to read said avoid UHT stuff as well, but still it seems to turn out okay. Maybe there because I’m using majority milk (not UHT) with a minority, about 1/5, being half-n-half or cream which is UHT-pasteurized.
From 1.5 quarts of Aldi cream costing $4.50 I got a bit over 1.3 pounds of butter, so it’s under $3.40 a pound. I recognize it’s not exactly fair to compare the cost of this butter (using Aldi cream) to the now-crazy price of LO’L butter, but Aldi’s regular butter is $4.00/lb here, too. And this homemade stuff tastes a lot better. We use anywhere from 2-6 pounds a week depending on how much baking is going on, so if I start a 1.5 quart jug of cream culturing every 2-3 days I should be set. I can always back off if I start getting too much loaded up in the fridge.
OMG… the butter I buy (Challenge unsalted) is now $7.49/lb. Haven’t shopped for it in a while as I have a couple of pounds of it in the freezer, but this is crazy.
I use WAY less than you do so I am not gonna try making it, but wow 7.49/lb is nuts!
Here in MA this week, I spent $5.29 for a pound of Kate’s unsalted butter. Kate’s is a smaller brand from Maine and typically costs a bit more than big brands. I’m sure I am paying more than this time last year but I don’t have the data to know how much more.
Fortunately we don’t use much butter at our house, either.
Just seeing this. And also appalled at the cost inflation of butter!
To me, homemade butter has a different flavor than the store kind — I grew up with both: homemade butter was produced every couple of weeks as a step in ghee-making, store butter for toast etc.
Do you not find a distinct flavor difference in what you’re making vs what you buy?
Challenge has been (like last week) $3.99 at Grocery Outlet. Same of Land 0’Lakes, Grasslands and several other ordinary brands. Irish and Finnish 250gr (half pound) blocks are $3.99 there. I keep around a half dozen pounds in the freezer at all times.
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CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
9
As far as taste goes, it depends on how I make it. My last batch I was in a hurry and just made butter from cream; it tastes very much like Land O’ Lakes and I’ve been weighing the salt addition to match what LOL says is their sodium content (the batches I salt), normed up to account for the sodium mass content % in regular salt. [Edit - this ends up 7.3 g salt per pound butter, and I’ve been using fine pickling salt.] This is what is referred to as “sweet cream butter”.
I more often have followed the video I put in the original post where I culture the cream first, then make the butter. This butter has a distinctly more “buttery” flavor than sweet cream butter. I’ve found that 7 days is unnecessary, 3-4 get very similar results with more useful buttermilk byproduct. At 7 days, the butter is fine but the buttermilk is bitingly acidic.
Incidentally, since mid-May when I made the original post, Land O’ Lakes has dropped back down to about $5.75/lb here whereas Aldi’s cream has jumped from $2.99 to $3.89 per quart, so my home-made butter is now closer to $4.60/lb (the numbers won’t work exactly because I found in my first batch, that 1.3 lbs of butter I got had at least an ounce or 2 of buttermilk that I had not properly squished out).
I’m not familiar with grocery outlet, but I sent the question (back in May) to my relatives in the Midwest and theirs was still around $4/lb, too. I think they mostly have Kroger and IGA stores.
This sounds astoundingly inexpensive to me. I’m pretty sure we’re paying at least $3.89 a PINT.
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CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
12
Holy Cow! I guess I should count my blessings. The “fancy” local dairy at my regular grocery was running $4.90 per quart, now $5.50, still cheaper than you’re seeing, which is why I was happy to be buying Aldi’s a $3 (now $3.90 and grumble grumble).
Can I ask (generally) where you live/shop? I’m in the Southeastern US.
Here in Denmark the price for 500 gram Lurpak salted butter is now 27 dkr/$3.5
The price used to be 20 dkr/$2.8
This Christmas I bought 10 packs of 500 gram Lurpak butter for 4 dkr/$0.5 a pack - unfortunately I don’t think I’ll ever see these low prices on butter ever again in my life time.
In Westchester County, NY, Land o Lakes was typically $4.99/pound before inflation took off, now $6.99 seems to be the going rate. I buy Kerrygold from Costco for $11.99 for 2 pounds, or sometimes Costco’s Kirkland brand, which works out to around $3.50/pound if I recall correctly (for a 4-lb package).
Is that really what it is in store? It’s 15.20 for delivery via Costco, and as it turns out 14.20 via Instacart - even though Costco delivers via Instacart.
Just bizarre - but also, I’ve never experienced that significant a cost difference between in store and home delivery.
I think so, although I haven’t bought it in a few trips so it may have gone up. I know it was just over $5 a pound the last time I bought it, though, because I remember thinking “why would I pay $5/lb for Land o Lakes when I can have Kerrygold for pennies more?” I only buy American butter for baking because it tends to work better in American recipes, although it is generally easy to adapt them to Kerrygold/other European higher-fat butters.