I love the salted French cultured butters. I use them a lot, and I’ve adjusted my cooking to omit or minimize adding more salt as the dish is built. 95% o the time, there’s absolutely no problem with oversalting. Hgwever, if I’m using another heavily-salted ingredient or forced to use commercial stock (or worse yet, BTB), I face a Hobson’s choice: salinity too high for my liking, or omitting the cultured butter.
I know I can find and use “regular” American unsalted sweet butter, but I’m wondering if there are any good cultured butters around that are unsalted.
This also raises the question of how sensitive our individual palates are to salt. My sense is that, even though I love salty things, my taste has evolved to the point that ideal seasoning has become somewhat elusive–for me, most dishes in restaurants arrive either under- or overseasoned. How finicky are you when it comes to seasoning and has this changed with time and experience?
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
2
Not finicky,as such. I used to have a “normal” relationship with food but, some 25 years back, stopped cooking with salt or adding it to my food at the table. I now find “normal” salting to be very salty - thankfully most restaurants in the UK have reduced their salt usage over the years so rarely an issue nowadays.
President butter us made from cultured cream and comes in unsalted.
Eschire butter is cultured. It comes in salted, lightly salted and unsalted.
CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
7
If you’re still having trouble finding it, you can make a couple of pounds of unsalted cultured butter at home and keep most in the freezer for those times when you end up needing to use other too-salty ingredients.
Edit - Oops, forgot the 2nd question. The only thing that’s changed for me over time is they way I add salt on meats like steaks and roasts etc., but I don’t think I’ve changed in terms of overall amount preference.
I used to enjoy salt on the outside post-cooking. Now, I’d prefer to get the salt as close to “right” in advance through dry brining or marinade, and don’t really like the more raw flavor of salt sprinkled atop a cooked steak or slab of roast.
I love Kate’s butter, Ave find the salted butter in most local market chains. I only recently found they had and unsalted sticks too. Not sure if this is a recent development, or just not popular enough in my area. I’m not sure if they would consider their product “cultured” but I find their butter tasty. Q
Here’s a method using a stand mixer and kefir. In the comments he says plain yogurt with live cultures can be subbed for kefir. He gives more detail about storage and spoilage than the What’s Eating Dan video does.
IME, even the “low sodium” version of BTB at the recommended ratio is too salty. I only use it when I judge that there’s sufficient other stuff going into a dish to substantially dilute the salinity. For example, if I were wanting to use it to cook potatoes or pasta, I might, but then I would probably not further season.
TY for sharing this. I love Glen. Also, I have eaten through the cultured butter I bought in CA and was thinking about making my own since I already have kefir. This looks very doable but now I want a glass beaker…
