I'm from Kerry and it makes me so proud to hear everyone praising Kerrygold. It really is an incredible product. My grandfather worked all his life with Kerry Co-Op which was Kerry group started as. I'll bet when he was driving the milk trucks for over north Kerry into Listowel he didn't know he was helping start as global success story 50 years ago.
> Many European butters are also cultured (meaning they’re made with added live cultures, resulting in a lactic flavor), which can further enhance the tanginess.
I'm surprised culturing is reduced to a single throwaway line, since it makes a huge difference in flavor: some of the heavily cultured butter brands out there are closer to cheese. If you're ever in Australia, try Pepe Saya on fresh sourdough!
> I'm surprised culturing is reduced to a single throwaway line
Yes, as a (lapsed) amateur butter maker, I'd say this is the main difference between European butter and US butter, not the fat content. If you make your own butter with ordinary cream, it'll taste bland like US butter, irrespective of the fat content. You need to add a culture. Not just any culture, which you might get if you leave your cream out of the fridge long enough before starting, but one of the right cultures. Search for "cultured butter" on the interweb for further information.
As an aside, my personal view is that making your own butter doesn't provide anywhere near the same return on investment as making your own bread - home made butter takes ages, doesn't really taste that much better, and can cost more money, while home made bread doesn't take that long, and can taste a lot better.
> I'd say this is the main difference between European butter and US butter, not the fat content.
Brit here; British supermarket butter isn't cultured. Most French butter isn't cultured either. Characterising european butter as cultured butter is misleading.
> As an aside, my personal view is that making your own butter doesn't provide anywhere near the same return on investment as making your own bread - home made butter takes ages, doesn't really taste that much better, and can cost more money, while home made bread doesn't take that long, and can taste a lot better.
There is a good book called "Make the Bread, Buy the Butter" which covers what foods give the best return on time, effort, and money invested.
It probably depends if you have a good baker near you. (I really don't although some of the local "craft" breads carried by a couple local stores aren't bad.)
But philosophically, it makes a lot of sense generally. You're not going to make everything from scratch or near-scratch so it makes sense to focus on the stuff you can't readily buy or which you genuinely enjoy the making process.
It really depends on the kind of bread you like too. It's true for bog standard wheat sourdoughs and stuff but not for more complex breads like borodinsky [1] which has steps that take several days and include everything from boiling water to molasses.
Indeed. The butter I buy here in Denmark is also 80% fat, and it tastes nothing like the blandness of US butter. Speaking personally, though, I definitely prefer Danish butter to French butter, but French butter is still really good.
As an aside, I've (UK) pretty much only ever eaten Lurpak for the last 40+ years and recently had an 'argument' with a Continental friend who vilified salted butter, which I just couldn't get my head around as I find unsalted butters tedious. Until, that is, I tried 'going fancy' and buying some expensive French salted butter and realised what he meant. Good Lord, that stuff was salty!
I now appreciate that Lurpak is marked as 'lightly salted', which makes all the difference.
Thank you for a lifetime's dutiful service, Danish Milk Cooperative :)
> If you're ever in Australia, try Pepe Saya on fresh sourdough!
As it happens, I will be in Australia for a bit next month. This is the kind of intelligence I find invaluable. One thing I like doing as a tourist is going to grocery stores to see how locals eat. What else should I be looking for? [Insert joke about Foster's here :)]
I haven't experienced it first hand, but all my ozzie and kiwi friends are bragging about how good their coffee is. All the gourmet types I served them are not up to snuff according to them. So give that a try. :)
I work in the coffee industry so maybe I'm a bit jaded here, but most of the edge in coffee that Australian's can claim to comes from that particular snobbishness that coffee seems to bring out in some people.
Don't get me wrong, you can get great coffee in Australia and they do genuinely care about it. But you can't get better coffee than you'll get by visiting a "third-wave" specialty coffee shop in any big city around the world. What you will get is a stronger helping of "our coffee is better than everyone else's" served alongside your cup. For a real sneer, if you dare, go into Melbourne coffee shop and order an Americano instead of a long black. Or maybe you'll get lucky and meet less condescending baristas there than I did. I certainly hope so.
As a coffee snob with lots of Aussie and Kiwi friends, you _can_ get equally good coffee in other places, but in places like Melbourne and Wellington fantastic coffee is ubiquitous. In other places (e.g. London where I am) you have to go looking for it.
> For a real sneer, if you dare, go into Melbourne coffee shop and order an Americano instead of a long black.
That's stupid, it might be impressive they know the difference, but what if I actually wanted an Americano? (Hot water added, vs espresso pulled into it in a long black.)
I'm not so snobbish as to care (and I prefer lungo anyway - long shot all brewed, no pure water added) it just seems to me if they're going to be like that then they should recognise they're different and offer both. 'Certainly sir, or if you prefer we can do a long black too' sort of thing, acknowledging that the customer may be just as snobbish/knowledgeable, but accustomed to ordering Americano because 'long black' would generally furrow eyebrows.
I do think in hindsight I may have experienced it though, in the UK - I didn't order, but my aunt or someone was told they don't do Americanos and came back with a filter coffee or something. At the time I thought they were just incompetent ('do you do espressos? Hot water?' I would have not been able to resist retorting) but now I think probably it was similar to your experience. Stupid.
> At the time I thought they were just incompetent ('do you do espressos? Hot water?' I would have not been able to resist retorting) but now I think probably it was similar to your experience. Stupid.
Yup, your aunt got a dose of coffee snobbishness I'm afraid. The worst I've experienced recently was when several of us went into a specialty coffee shop that I'd been recommended in Saigon. All except for one ordered ordered coffee. My last friend can't handle anything with caffeine so she asked what other drinks were on the menu. There were none, no non-coffee drinks and no decaf either. Eventually we asked what the ~5 year old child on the table beside us was drinking. Babychino (foamed milk). Great, it's not on the menu but she'll have one.
They charged us $6 for the babychino, or more even (180k VND I think). When we complained they pointed out the tiny print on the bottom of the bill that there's a surcharge for anyone who doesn't drink coffee. Imagine if a bar did that.
Where did you go in Saigon where you got such a high fee (or a fee in general for not having coffee)? I’m genuinely curious as in my experience, even at really touristy specialty coffee places the coffee based drinks were no more than 80k, and never had a fee for someone who didn’t drink something with coffee, so a fee so high sounds strange. Admittedly all the cafes I went to had some kind of juice, so it wouldn’t have been a problem in any case.
My litmus tests for coffee shops is to order a batch brew (if they don't do that, anything that's not based of an espresso). Good beans and proper machine maintenance can be tasted very well in the humble batch brew.
We have nice bread in the US. Sometimes people outside the US don't realize the massive amount of choice we have here. There are like 50 different kinds of bread in the supermarket I go to. Unbleached organic flour is also readily available if you'd like to make your own bread. There's 10s-100s of types of fresh vegetables probably. There are organic variations of almost every available vegetable and herb as well. We have pretty good regulations around food labelling, so you can find healthy things. You just have to be vigilant. It isn't that hard to eat a diverse, healthy diet, once you know what to avoid. Bad things to eat do exist here though, and they're quite addictive. I think our car centric culture lends to eating fast, processed things. You can eat a full diet of rice, beans, vegetables, and meats very cheaply in the US. It gets about 2x more expensive when you go for organic foods, though. It's still significantly cheaper to eat a healthy diet of all unprocessed organic foods than it is to regularly eat at restaurants.
Before I had an interest in researching a healthy diet I made poor dietary choices. I don't think the good choices are always immediately obvious. I also spent about 3x my normal time in the supermarket when I first started eating healthy. If you live somewhere with few grocery options you may have to drive pretty far. When I was a kid we commuted 40-50 miles (1hr drive) to go to a better, cheaper grocery store.
I'm not sure I put much stock in the "organic" label which I mostly won't pay a premium to buy over the alternative. Though I do mostly buy fresh ingredients.
But to your original point, yeah, there are a ton of bread choices in a typical supermarket and, with few exceptions, I never buy the plastic-wrapped from the major manufacturers and buy something made in-house or otherwise locally or one of the "craft" breads from some other local company.
(The price difference isn't even that huge. It looks like a loaf of Wonder bread (stereotypical American white bread) at my local supermarket is $3.50 while better breads aren't necessarily more than $5--which isn't nothing for someone pinching pennies but isn't a huge premium either.
Dedicated bread bakeries aren't that common outside of major US cities but the larger supermarket chains often have in-house/local bakeries which have products that aren't bad.
In both Australia and the US, mass market/supermarket bread is crap. Of course there's plenty of decent sourdough etc to be found (Sonoma etc), but you have to look for it and it will cost you a pretty penny.
- Marmite. Not too much, just a light spread. Try it with eggs.
- Eta Munchos, spicy tomato flavour (NZ based, but you may find them)
- a pie from a bakery
- tim tams
- whitaker's chocolate
- anzac biscuits
Is it just a European (UK & France I'm most familiar with) thing that supermarkets sell alcohol? Seems weird to me when they're separate shops, but I'm realising it is perhaps most of the world?
In the US it varies by region. In most places you can buy beer and wine in grocery stores, while hard liquor is a different matter, generally sold only in package stores, sometimes state-run. But not always. I've seen stacks of Jack Daniels bottles in Louisiana convenience store.
Liquor varies. I've seen it in numerous Safeway's on the West Coast for example. Beer and wine is still far from universal. Massachusetts still has some screwy related laws. I think only a limited number of stores in a chain are allowed to sell beer and wine. I think there may also be some exceptions for stores close to the border with New Hampshire.
I’d recommend looking up a local farmers market if you can, the stuff in the supermarkets isn’t anything special most of the time, whereas you can find some amazing bread / cheese / butter etc at the markets. Also some pretty average stuff, but you might get lucky :)
The lactic acid tanginess from bacterial cultures is the biggest difference in the taste difference between European and American butter IMO. The 84% vs. 82% fat thing is way too overrated as I've had uncultured butter made in both ratios and they were virtually indistinguiable as spreads.
Now do chocolate. The first time I tasted Hershey's chocolate was... interesting, to say the least. For the uninitiated: It tastes like vomit. No, I'm not being purposefully annoying, it literally tastes like vomit. And that's entirely unsurprising, because apparently whatever process they use produces butyric acid.
I got over it in small quantities. I can eat Hershey's Kisses, which are rather tiny, and the vomit is now just an expected by-taste that works in small doses.
Funny how butyric acid was actually named after butter, and is found in butter among other things, yet butter tastes wonderful and vomit is (literally) disgusting.
Hershey's is truly disgusting, but do not get me started on the absolutely unjustified reverence the Brits have for a mediocre-at-best chocolate like Cadbury's...
Cadbury's has never been treated as anything other than a "chocolate for the masses". It was however, a pretty decent middle-of-the-road chocolate. Until it got bought out. Now it's shite.
Cadbury's has always been the sort of standard cheap block in Australia for my whole life (I'm in my 30s). Nobody ever considered it especially good (though having tasted Hershey's chocolate it is better than that), but having said that it definitely used to be better than it is now
The problem with tea in the US is less the brands available and more that on ordering you are often brought a cup of rapidly cooling hot water with a tea bag by the side. While fine for herbal or green tea it's terrible for standard black tea which tastes so much better when you pour the boiling water directly onto the tea bag.
Check out Indian and Iranian styles of making tea.
First, the traditional method doesn't use tea bags.
You boil the water, add the tea leaves or tea dust, at start or end, as you prefer.
Then strain, and add milk and sugar.
Iranian style tea (at least in India, as found in the few remaining Irani restaurants) is boiled for longer, and has a stronger and very distinctive taste.
In the Indian style, powdered spices like cardamom and cloves are often added. So is ginger.
This is usually called masala chai, and, for foreigners, it is not called chai tea. That would be like saying tea tea, because chai mean tea in Hindi. It is pronounced like hai.
I generally dislike McDonald's and will only eat there as an absolute last resort. But I pretty much wish all the "fast casual" burger places like Shake Shack would make fries like McDonalds because, while their burgers are universally way better than McDonald's, their fries are almost all decidedly not.
At this point I use Kerrygold every time I want to taste the butter. I sacrifice a pound to the garlic gods every few months, making clarified garlic butter which is amazing if you use garden garlic.
The remnant gets mixed with a quarter cup of butter and garlic bread is made. Now I’m hungry.
My youngest daughter and I set out to do a butter tournament in which we would pick the best tasting butter among all of those available in our local supermarkets. I believe we bought about $60 or $70 worth of butter and tried them on toast, in soup, and then just eating a little pat of it neat.
Kerrygold took the gold. I keep one of the doublewide bars in this [1] butter dish on the counter. Every now and then I’ll grab a cracker and scoop off a bit. It’s so good.
What’s your style? Call it the art of tasting butter without tasting butter?
I mean come on, if your goal is to taste test something, why wouldn’t you taste just it?
You should be doing this with every ingredient you cook with. how do you expect to know how to make good food if you don’t know how your ingredients taste?
I also use (silver) Kerrygold for direct consumption and random organic brands for cooking.
Kerrygold is somewhat decent product but far from the best. Availability (and price at Costco) are probably the main reason.
One of the best butters I had lately is Vermont Creamery. Hands down, the flavor was just amazing. If you enjoy good butter and haven’t had this one then consider giving it a try.
Vital Farms gained lot of popularity because of their pasture raised eggs and now butter. I tried it and it is good. What scares me is that they are in the Houston area. There’s a reason why the cancer rates are high there. Unfortunately “organic” doesn’t mean product is free of crap. It only means crap was not used to make it grow. (Reason why organic psyllium from India can legally contain lead and still be organic).
Vital Farms is the best American butter I've ever tasted. And I'm from Houston, lol. But they're not. The company is based in Austin and shows on their website that farms are not in Houston.
Maybe not in Houston, but last time I was down that way I saw signs on ranch gates advertising calves for sale on the road between Houston and Port Arthur. I'm sure someone's making butter down there.
Definitely availability. Almost every grocer here has it, though in a couple it's hidden away. Most of the other options require you to plan your trips a bit more judiciously.
Kerrygold’s ability to contain such an amazing amount of carotene — the source of the rich orange color — is so admirable in a mass produced product. Consistency in such a basic, natural foodstuff is no joke.
Kerrygold is great for strong savory foods, but I am too American to enjoy itin some cases. Frying eggs, grilled cheese, some cookies all suffer from the grassy taste overriding weaker flavors. American butter doesn't really taste like anything but cream/fat to me.
Whenever I hear takes like these I wonder how many people I've disgusted with my cooking. I have _literally no idea_ what you're talking about, much like it was a shock the first time someone said cilantro tasted like soap.
Really makes you respect people who manage to make everyone happy through cooking for a living!
People have totally different perceptions of taste sometime. I don't think most people get really disgusted. If you have cliantro soap taste genes you know about it and are clear to people about your ability to accept cilantro.
Many other things are just what you're used to. I spent a while trying chicken fried steak recipes with different oils and found out I liked sunflower oil the best, in terms of flavor. Many people can't stand it. It's just what you like.
Fun fact that has little to do with butter. The Disney name is a kind of anglicised contraction of d'Isigny (literally: from Isigny) which was the origin of some of Roy and Walt Disney ancestors. That part of the family first moved to a small village in Lincolnshire called Norton Disney.
I would add that this town is in the general area of D-day (Normandy) which is (was) notable for its milk production and products: butter, cream... and TRUE cheese ;-)
So my experience with butter is that it was yanked away from me early in my lifetime. Our family followed all kinds of bogus dietary fads. We had fluoridated water, Dad had hypertension, so we had margarine, and never whole milk, only 2%, and at one point there were even "Egg Beaters" without the yolks; fat, sodium and cholesterol was like dirty bywords among us. Furthermore, Mom was an avowed bad cook, and didn't have the faintest idea how to incorporate seasonings and spices into our meals, which were uniformly bland and unappealing.
Now, the sane advice is that salt and fat are not bad for you, but are essential to life and enjoyment. Of course margarine and all that other artificial, substitute crap turned out to be way more detrimental to us. A good amount of fat (and carbs) causes food to taste good and also be satisfying: you can pound a package full of rice cakes, or a giant salad and not feel full, unless you accompany it with butter or oil.
Julia Childs and French people couldn't be wrong: they consume plenty of rich food and they don't have American health problems. This may be a canard, but it's true that the FDA/USDA doesn't actually advocate for consumer health; just look at the ridiculous "food group" "food pyramid" propaganda they keep sending us.
Today at home I am unapologetically natural, and I love organic food. I use organic whole un-homogenized milk. I use Kerrygold unsalted. I also use Himalayan pink salt, because table salt has no nutritional value (all the nutrition is refined away and sold to supplement companies!)
Conventional wisdom about food is often dead wrong, but if you sift through all the fad diets and bogus medical advice, you can sometimes find nuggets of truth.
> I also use Himalayan pink salt, because table salt has no nutritional value
It’s… salt. Himalayan pink salt also has no real nutritional value (it is probably lacking iodine tho), it’s just salt with inclusions of other mineral that you get in much larger quantities with regular food. Unless you literally eat large chunks of salt every day, I guess.
Pink salt is a fad/marketing thing, exactly as margarine was…
Try a double blind tasting. I don't knjow people who can tell pink salt from plain kitchen salt by taste, and I am familiar with a number of professional wine sommeliers.
A lot of the taste difference with salt comes from the size it’s ground to, or at least that’s what I was told in the one cooking class. Hence why you might want to sprinkle a steak with large chunks of salt, but use finely ground somewhere else.
99% of the time we are using salt for flavor, not for the nutritional value. So the inclusion of a small amount of minerals has value in changing the flavor of the salt. Also, iodine adds a bad metallic taste, so that's another reason to choose something besides standard table salt.
Unless you want goiter and cretinism, iodising salt is (for inland populations, at least) a big public health win.
(tangentially related: I once heard a story that there was some deficiency disease that was only diagnosed after WWII: it turns out allied officers in japanese POW camps got white, not brown, rice — and were massively affected by the disease in question while the enlisted men in the same camps were barely affected)
Iodized salt was responding to a regional deficiency that was discovered 100+ years ago. The data that the decision was based on is completely obsolete.
It is not a problem that can be fixed "forever". Iodised salt solved it, so moving away to non-iodised salts can make it resurface. One should evaluate their own personal iodine intake - if you are not getting it from salt then you should be getting it from somewhere else.
I find myself reaching for the pink one more often than not. Taste has a lot more going for it than the concentrated white dust natrium chloride. It's also interesting that you cannot taste the difference. Do you usually consume lots of the stuff?
Coarser-grained salt, if it's sprinkled on top of something, can give you more of a salt taste sensation which can often be desirable. But that's the effect of the size of the grains, not any trace mineral or other elements.
Indeed, I do use coarser salt or fleur de sel, but only on few things (e.g. on top of a steak, fish, or on oven-baked potatoes), and I do notice the difference. To me, pink salt just doesn’t taste different to comparably-sized white salt in a noticeable way.
Yes, and it's noticeable. Most people don't feel the difference probably because the food they are adding it to is already extremely tasty. But trust me, put some salt on an unseasoned fish and you'll immediately taste the differences
I cannot disagree more! Iodine is an essential part of sea salt. Rock salt is bland and boring in comparison. That said, I agree that refined salt is much worse.
> Pink salt is a fad/marketing thing, exactly as margarine was…
Only if you believe microplastics are harmless (you really shouldn't).
Sea salt consistently has far more plastic in it than rock salt. If I'm reading this study [0] right, it's about 10x more microplastics than rock salt, which makes sense if you think about it.
> If I'm reading this study [0] right, it's about 10x more microplastics than rock salt, which makes sense if you think about it.
Yes, it does make sense, but that’s because micro plastics are everywhere we bother to look. In the air, in the water, in the fish, in animals, etc. However, that is no evidence that the micro plastics we get from salt are significant in any way compared to other sources, particularly considering how little of the stuff we actually eat. From an ecological point of view, getting it from the sea is much better than ripping mountains apart to extract it.
Even though I don’t care for micro plastics (e.g. I don’t look into it), I also buy (perfectly white) rock salt by chance.
They dig it up 10 km from here, not on the Himalaya.
Given the inorganic nature of sea salt, I believe it should be feasible to remove most microplastics from it, by applying intense heat briefly, in an oxygen atmosphere, so the microplastic particles would just burn away.
In The Netherlands, if you want your iodine dosage, all you need to do is eat bread once a day (I don't know if it counts for all bread like gluten-free). Because it is fortified with iodine. Other countries solve it differently, but you don't have to normally make up for it in The Netherlands.
> French people couldn't be wrong: they consume plenty of rich food and they don't have American health problems.
And you know why your average American turns into an unhealthy tub of lard ?
Simple really:
1) Americans have a penchant for over-processed foods which in turn contain high-levels of "the wrong" fats and, of course, sugar (which in America is generally the horrible processed type, e.g. corn syrup) .
2) American portion sizes for one meal could feed an entire African family for a week, American portions are obscene
3) Americans are largely sedentary, and have a penchant for driving instead of walking
4) Americans have a penchant for intensive industrial farming which reduces the quality of the raw ingredient
Now, you may choose to try to argue over point (4) if you feel you must be patriotic and defend US agriculture. But points (1)–(3) are, regrettably hard truths.
It's not rocket science.
Eat Less. Eat Better. Do Some Exercise. Your body will thank you.
> 2) American portion sizes for one meal could feed an entire African family for a week, American portions are obscene
I don't get why people get so up in arms about this, especially as it's socially acceptable to take out leftovers (unlike, say, Italy). Personally, I'm a tallish, moderately active guy and I need some 3.5k-4k kcal a day, and America is the only country I've been to that I don't have to worry about being hungry after a meal out.
Because, at the end of the day, calories are what cause weight gain.
Consider if you had a pet and you were to put out twice as much food for every feeding.
It gets even worse if you think about cultural aspects, like teaching kids to make a "happy plate", which condition them to eat everything served to them.
Sure, studies have not been able to show strong evidence of a causal link between portion size and obesity.[1][2][3]
But it's hard to ignore that American obesity rates and portion sizes have increased over the same period of time.
And, at the very least, decreasing portion size probably helps with maintaining weight. [4]
The 2000 kcal reference (which I assume you're referring to) isn't for "an average man", but for an average person. For an average man, the reference value would be somewhere between 2.5k to 3k.
I simply observed that I lose weight if I eat <3k kcal over long stretches. I think human metabolism has a very wide variance, though it's hard to find good quality studies about it.
I count my calories and I eat between 3.5k and 4k. I had a few periods where I ate <3k. These are two separate things. The latter is significant because the fact that I lost weight makes me think that I need my usual intake to retain my weight.
Metabolism varies widely among individuals, and there is no clear understanding on the relationship between calorie intake and weight. All the calculators and estimates you find on the internet are based on surface level low-quality estimates that don't (and can't) take into account all of the variances at work. That said I am aware that I'm a bit of an extreme case (always been teased for that) but that's how random variables work, sometimes there are data points outside of the bulk.
I would say that in France (and Europe generally) they are only true as you (unfortunately) move down the socio-economic scale.
My experience of Europe is that people who can afford it generally do eat well.
As for the driving, I'm not sure I agree. For a start, most US cities barely have any public transport, which automatically pushes people to get in the car (either due to laziness or due to distance). Meanwhile in Europe there are normally plentiful public transport options except for the countryside.
Sitting in a bus is still sitting, offering no health benefits vs sitting in a car (arguably, it's even less healthy when crowded). If the topic is health, the opposite here is walking, or (to lesser extent) cycling.
> Sitting in a bus is still sitting, offering no health benefits vs sitting in a car
Actually no.
With a car, you get into the car outside your house, and you typically aim to park the car as close to physically possible to your destination.
With public transport, you have to walk to the nearest stop near your house, and you have to walk to your destination from the destination stop.
In addition, with trains you will have the opportunity to walk up and down stairs.
You might also walk to run errands around the local area, for example, walking to/from grocery shopping with a few bags, instead of driving to the supermarket, dumping the bags in the back of the car and only walking/carrying the limited distance between your car and the kitchen.
You might also opt to walk a slightly longer route if for example it takes you through a local park.
Walking to/from bus stop surely doesn't sound impressive. You can practice a smallscale shopping with every sort of transport (it depends more on available shopping infrastracture, and economical reasons). And you surely can walk more by choice irrespective of transport (it depends on available pedestrian-friendly infrastructure). Choice is choice, and sitting is still sitting.
And for the bus you might be standing instead of sitting, you might have to change lines, etc. This is hyper easy to test with a $5 pedometer.
I'm willing to bet $100 that if you buy the pedometer and compare both commutes, the bus commute will mean that you have at least 2x the number of steps when you commute by bus versus when you commute by car (for the actual commute).
It's nitpicking. You can make 500 steps vs 100, and make a headline-like claim that it's five times more. In real life difference is negligible. Your organism requires walking in significant doses, and for you to practice it, you have to live in a walkable space (it includes infrastracture, and safety). A city can be driven by public transport, and not be pedestrian-friendly. A city can be private-car driven, and not be pedestrian-friendly.
I find that extraordinarily hard to believe. On my visits to the US from the UK, I’m always struck by how appalling to food options are in the US. Eating anything that isn’t filled with sugar, and about 3 portions too large, requires some thought, when you’re in the major cities. Outside of those cities, you need to expend real effort to find healthy food options.
Huge portions of the menus you find in many “resultants” in the US simply isn’t legal in EU because quality of food is simply too low.
The UK isn’t exactly know for it culinary expertise, but returning from the US to the UK is like finding water in the desert when it come the quality of food available.
Maybe it's just that I don't eat at restaurants a huge amount in the US and I mostly eat at better restaurants when I do. But I travel to Europe quite a bit and I just don't see the stark difference.
Yes, a lot of restaurants in the US will have a fair bit of filler (potatoes/rice/other vegetables) in a typical main course. But if I have fish and chips or a steak pie at a London pub, I'm probably not going to finish all the chips and other vegetables there either. I'm not sure I've just about ever looked at a main course in Europe and thought to myself "Oh, what a small portion."
And my experiences in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc. are similar.
I do agree that when you get out of major cities in the US, food options can be pretty limited. Even where I live, about 50 miles outside of a major city, there are only a few places I eat at or get takeout from on anything like a regular basis and I wouldn't like to subsist on food from them 7 days a week.
For the me the stark difference comes from the plentiful supply is extremely low quality food. At the better end of the food quality scale I think the US and EU are comparable.
But when you look towards the bottom end of the food quality scale, the bar for saleable food is just abysmally low compared to the EU. You simply can’t buy food of such poor quality here. As a consequence the average quality of food in EU is substantial better, not because the EU produces better food, but simply because it doesn’t accept the low quality stuff the US is happy to eat.
That may be the case. I basically never eat fast food aside from the occasional local pizza place or maybe a food truck. This is true whether at home or traveling so I don't really have a comparison scale at the low end.
That's probably generally true although I've also stayed in smaller towns in places like northern California and meal options were pretty limited there too. A problem is that you can devolve to fast food chains pretty quickly and the local options aren't necessarily any better. A good (pricier) restaurant in a small town probably isn't really supportable by just locals.
I split my time between the US and UK. If the food options in the US are "appalling" relative to the UK, it makes me wonder what parts of the US you've been spending your time in.
Food and cuisine in the US is highly regional, and varies immensely. In the part of the US where I currently live (Pacific Northwest), the local food is much healthier than is typical in the UK and higher quality. Portion sizes are not uniform across the US either but I would agree that on average the UK is significantly smaller.
I wouldn't characterize typical food in the UK as particularly healthy, it reminds me much more of the diet you see in the Rust Belt of the US. The relative dearth of fresh, high-quality vegetables in the UK is particularly noticeable for people that have lived on the west coast of the US (which has amazing fresh vegetables generally by global standards).
France is going shit in this regard as do most developed countries, that's true, but my friend if you want to equate US and FR when it comes to diet and results on current population, they are not in the same league, heck its a different universe. French are much more conscious about quality of the food, fine taste and other aspects that cheap junk food doesn't provide.
Walk around any french town, you will see crowds of tall, slender thin people with few overweight folks. Sports are a priority and source of pride, alpinism, climbing or paragliding are deemed as national sports, not some extreme fringe stuff for few adrenaline junkies. Do the same exercise randomly in US, and chances are very good what you will see will be dramatically different. That being said, there are (were at least in 2003) many faces of US - I've spent that summer working blue collar jobs in US as part of work&travel programme US was providing, and already LA was exactly as we discuss. Then I moved to rural Maine and it was night & day, I've met maybe 5 fat people in 5 weeks spent there (but its true racial diversity back there was 0, I've seen 1 black guy in 5 weeks and maybe 2-3 of asian origin, rest looked just like they arrived from Scandinavia).
But judging by various articles and feedback from friends that Maine experience was much less common than LA one, and over time even more so. US portions are simply needlessly big and often unhealthy. The logic is to eat till full, instead of just warding off hunger and enjoying few very finely tasting bites.
Because French culture and English culture also gets overburdened by American brands such as McDonald's and Coca Cola.
I like the example of the American pizza. Its not even crunchy, its more dough than anything else. Its pizza with topping, instead of the other way around.
I don't doubt that #4 is probably technically true and environmentally relevant, but I suspect most people's health issues are far more excess-related than deficiency related, even if there's a few specific things most people might not have enough of, so 1-3 are probably a far bigger deal.
I remember being 17 and visiting the USA with my family. We were 4 people. The waitress very nicely picked up that we were tourists (from Sweden) and told us to only order 2 dishes and share them. We were full from that.
It is pretty normal in the US to share dishes between people at restaurants. Some restaurants also offer half portions even if it isn't listed on the menu.
Ah yes, American bashing. I won't go into the psychology behind it because I don't want to insult your background or whatever country you may be from.
By calling it a penchant, you make it sound like Americans choose these things. Most of us are held hostage by capitalist interests. Right now, it's much cheaper to eat processed foods than it is to make a similar meal from whole foods. Also, most of our towns over here in the New World were built with cars in mind. It's not generally feasible to walk places unless you live in a large city. Most people don't have 2+ hours to make a walking trip to the grocery store 5 miles away.
What prevents people from biking these 5 miles? Can't be capitalism, because bikes are cheaper than cars or just fuel with amortization costs for such trips.
For 2+ years I had to bike 12 km each time I needed groceries. In fact, this was in France.
Well first, the original poster is making a gross generalization about Americans. Many Americans do bike places for enjoyment and necessity. Just like France, it's the exception not the norm in places with spread out amenities. Just like France, the decision to do this or not do this is based on things like free-time, safety, money, and yes, laziness.
America has to find a way to keep all the sugar plantations and beef/dairy land we violently established relevant so sugar, dairy, meat and corn go in everything. Anything less would be communism /s
> Julia Childs and French people couldn't be wrong: they consume plenty of rich food and they don't have American health problems.
This is BS. I'm French, born and raised and we are plenty fat / unhealthy here.
I'm in my first week of the McDougall diet because I'm fat. That's the so called French diet that made me that way (for reference I ate fast food only 3 times since 2020, so junk food isn't responsible for my weight).
There is no magic, you can't feast like a king everyday and stay healthy. Slim people here either don't feast everyday (they have a self control I don't have) or are doing a lot of sport (or both).
I don’t think anybody is claiming that the “French diet” is some sort of magic trick that means you can never eat unhealthy. That obviously untrue.
But the population statistics speak for themselves. People in the US far more likely to be overweight and obese, to an extreme degree, than those in France. Given that nutrition is major component in determining a person physical wellbeing, it’s seems quite reasonable to suggest that maybe the French just eat better (on average) than their US counterparts.
None of that prevents individuals from shooting for gold on the weighing scales. But one overweight person doesn’t mean the entire country is doomed to obesity.
There are plenty of fat people in every country. But if you take a flight into e.g. Chicago from anywhere else in the world, you will not even need to leave the airport to see how much fatter America is. Many, many people in America are nearly physically handicapped from obesity. The word 'fat' has an inflated meaning in America.
One of the surprising things about the United States food safety and labelling laws, is that you're allowed to write "0 grams of trans fat" even when there is 0.5 grams! (Per serving quanta.) In countries such as Canada, there must be fewer than 0.1 grams to say 0.0 -- IOW United States processed foods really cannot be trusted. Even small amounts of trans fats are incredibly dangerous to your heart. Avoid them!
The combination of rounding rules and freedom of serving size is just ridiculous. You can buy oil in the US that lists 0 fat and 0 calories per serving, because the serving size is like 1/4 tsp or something. The EU's mandatory labeling per 100 g avoids that kind of chicanery and makes things much easier to compare.
This is uncannily like my own upbringing. Dad with hypertension, mum hated cooking (and was therefore a bad cook), margarine, the works. And it sounds that like me it meant you discovered an explicit pleasure in food. I often wonder if in fact I should be thanking my mother for setting that up for me! I married into a Spanish family who are all foodies even by Spanish standards, and I love the fact that when we're eating together we talk about the food we're eating, the last time we ate this food, the meal that reminds us of, oh and remember those amazing roast peppers we had in Rioja etc. etc. etc. I've had semi-spiritual experiences from my mother-in-law's cooking (peppers stuffed with salt cod is a particular highlight).
There was definitely a period 20+ years ago when I was leading weekend group hiking trips when health conscious people (which most people on these trips were) would basically stage a revolt if you only supplied butter, whole milk, etc. (Eggs were mostly OK.)
My associates at MIT have switched their families to the carnivore diet. Apparently sugar molecules are like little daggers which stab into and get stuck to the arteries and the fat gets clogged in the arteries
because of sugar. No sugar no problems.
I wonder if this difference is always why Americans don't put butter on sandwiches or consider just bread and butter a completely normal snack. If it doesn't taste like anything I can see why it wouldn't make sense.
Butter is a key component of a quintessential American sandwich - the grilled cheese. Also, bread and butter is a midwestern dinner table staple, and buttered crackers are things I snack on, I put them out for dinner parties. Though, older people use margarine for "health reasons".
If I want tanginess on a sandwich, I reach for mustard.
American butter mostly tastes like salt and hardened milkfat … which is pretty ho-hum.
I suspect most Americans use butter for the salinity rather than the flavor.
I further suspect that people butter their grilled cheese not for flavor, but for crisping the bread and building a barrier against the grease released by the melting cheese.
I didn't find out you could make a grilled cheese with mayo until a few years ago. My husband still won't even try it. In my region, I doubt that most people would be comfortable using mayo instead of butter.
You also have to consider the fact that many households' standard loaf on hand is white sandwich bread. There will always be a place in my heart for the squishy comfort of a slice of our locally-made white bread, but the fanciest butter wouldn't make it a delicacy. Cheap store brand butter on a discount grocery store "baguette" is a much better snack. Then there's butter on saltines to go with a stew or pea soup. The taste of my childhood.
As has been talked to death, the quantity distribution of bread in the US is atrocious. It was certainly my experience when I visited the US. There is a hilariously culturally significant post in /r/Australia where an American tourist talks almost erotically about a loaf of bread they bought here once, and it’s later discovered that it was just cheap, standard, supermarket bread.
We were also heavily conditioned through the 80s and early 90s to not use butter for health reasons. Many homes stopped using lard and animal fats entirely in favor of artificially flavored plant-based butter substitutes that melted poorly and tasted horribly.
I'd say Americans generally expect butter to be used in situations where it's intended to melt. So we use butter on hot toast, hot waffles, baked potatoes, hot dinner rolls, and so forth.
On sandwiches we use mayonnaise since the sandwich is cold, and the eggy flavor of mayo is really tasty, and cold mayo is easy to spread but cold butter is not -- if you used regular sandwich bread it would most likely tear.
Plain room-temp bread and butter we don't eat much of, but that's because sandwich bread isn't usually very good by itself, not because of the quality of the butter.
I think the butter-with-hot-food thing might also be because we usually keep butter in the fridge. I'm aware some people keep butter at room temperature so it's spreadable, but that's never been popular in the US.
In the UK, the common distinction is salted vs unsalted butter.
You want room-temperature butter so it's spreadable. Ripped bread and dry toast are awful, and nobody says "I'll take one portion of butter out of the fridge so I can have toast in 30 minutes from now".
Salted butter will survive being left at room temperature longer than unsalted butter, because the salt helps inhibit bacterial growth. Once you've thrown away your third half-eaten pack of unsalted butter because it's gone rancid before you could finish it, you get the picture.
Even in the fridge, salted butter lives longer than unsalted. So why ever buy unsalted? Because in baking, salt kills your yeast. Even if yeast isn't involved, you usually don't want salty cakes, muffins, pastry, etc.
Hence unsalted butter in the fridge for baking while salted butter for eating on the counter-top.
It wouldn’t last that long here, for sure. The salt in the eating butter keeps it good. Cooking butter usually needs to be cold for baking and pastries.
I have a Japanese Koshikawa butter knife (dubbed “I can’t believe it’s not Clutter” by a friend of mine) so even eating butter can be dealt with swiftly - similar to a butter curler.
Where I am from they butter every visible piece of bread but you will be hard pressed to find a single household where butter is not kept in the fridge. In fact, I'd argue that the only country that keeps butter at the room temp seems to be the UK.
In the tropics, both butters go in the fridge. Heck, in the tropics, almost everything that's not a dry, dessicated powder or otherwise dehydrated goes in the fridge.
Understandable - we used to have a clear plastic roof over the kitchen and in the summer even dry herbs and spices were at risk of spontaneous combustion.
Where I live, 10 months of the year it makes no difference because it's going to be rock-hard and able to bend your knife no matter where you keep it. The remaining two months of the year butter left on the counter is a glorious yellow puddle.
Butter stays hard below 15 C (depending on variable like fat content). Fridge is 4 C. 8 months of the year my kitchen is below 15 C. I do not live in the tropics or even the subtropics.
My biggest confusion when shopping for butter in the US was trying to find one without added "butter aroma". If I’m already buying butter, why does it need flavourings of the very thing it’s made of?
I think we ended up settling for imported (Kerrigold?) butter that we knew from Germany…
> My biggest confusion when shopping for butter in the US was trying to find one without added "butter aroma". If I’m already buying butter, why does it need flavourings of the very thing it’s made of?
The USDA regulates the appearance and flavor of butter. They employ a bunch of professional butter tasters for this purpose. Perhaps something similar is going on with the smell.
I was pretty shocked when I looked up the standards for butter grading and learned that they don't serve any safety-related purpose. How do I conceivably derive any benefit from a label that says "in the opinion of the United States government, this butter is more visually appealing than other similar butters"?
They might have been looking at tubs of margarine or other spreadable products that mix butter with oils. I think tubs of real butter aren't all that popular (so wouldn't occupy a lot of shelf space).
No I’m talking about your run of the mill unsalted butter. Even what I felt were "premium" choices (organic, expensive etc) had "natural flavourings" in them.
Why put butter in a tub? Wasteful plastic packaging when a foil or wax wrapper is fine. Margarine is disgusting and in a tub because it won't hold its shape.
It's diacetyl, which is produced in traditional butter production, but not in modern butter production. They're adding it back in to make it taste more like butter.
If you haven’t made your own butter at home, you’re missing out. It literally takes 10 minutes and the blender does most of that work.
Pour a cup or two of heavy cream in the blender. Add a tspn or so of salt, and blend it on med. it’ll turn to whipped cream and then chunk into butter. Let it run for a minute or two more as the liquid co to yes to separate from the butter.
Scoop the butter into a non fuzzy towel or a few layers of cheesecloth and squeeze the remaining liquid out. Spread on hot bread or grab a spoon.
It involves baking heavy cream at a low temp in the oven for 12 hours, then chilling it and scooping up the dense layer on top. Tastes absolutely marvelous.
Made this for the first time semi-recently. Pretty amazing, easy to make, and (unsurprisingly) nothing like the “clotted cream” you get in those little jars.
In Russian cuisine, we do something similar with milk called топленое молоко. (I guess the best translation would be “baked milk”?) After hours in the oven, the milk gets infused with a deep caramel flavor.
For Germany (and other European countries) that’s only partly true. Kerrygold and similar butters sell in two varieties. With salt (silver wrapper) and without (golden wrapper). The salt-free variety is way more popular, so smaller shops may not always have salted Kerrygold and it may often sell out first when butter is on offer.
Great article btw that explained why butter in the US was so tasteless when I tried it. (Btw, butter I tried in Italy or Spain has the same problems)
Salt crystals, I only eat this kind of butter. But then I come from a department next to Brittany (and the local salt also has crystals and is cheaper than that from Brittany).
Apparently it's really a local thing because I have never been able to find butter with salt crystals from anywhere else, to my dismay since I haven't lived there for a long time (but I'm close enough to France that I can still get my butter there).
While nowhere near France, there is a fabulous cultured butter with salt crystals found around the Seattle metro area that is made locally (Cherry Valley Dairy). They make amazing butter generally but that style is by far my favorite.
I'm definitely not as much a butter aficionado as the author of the article is, just wanted to add that for me one of the best choices when it comes to European butter is the Irish Kerrygold. It's absolutely great butter, imo it's better even compared to more expensive French butters.
Related, one of my best memories related to butter, and a genuine good memory all around, was when my grandma was asking me to make butter while she was busy doing some other stuff around the house. It was easy enough and she knew that even city-boy me couldn't mess that simple thing up. It was very similar to what this guy is doing in this video [1]
Kerrygold quality seems to have went down drastically recently, maybe a year or two ago. Tastes rancid compared to Plugra, but it is still better than the other butters at $megamart.
> But while the American standard remains, well, the standard, it’s not as hard as it once was to find American-made butter with at least 82% butterfat and all the layered, complex flavors found in European butters.
This is key. If you really look, you can find gems pretty much everywhere even when the standard stuff in supermarkets is terrible. Good stuff in supermarkets is an indication of what local people value overall, so it is interesting from a cultural perspective. However, it is not an accurate view of what local producers can do.
Kate's of Maine is an excellent American butter. I buy it over Kerrygold or Finlandia (which are also excellent) because it seems silly to ship butter in cargo ships when there are plenty of cows right here.
If the only other option was store brand supermarket butter, I would choose Kerrygold, but not when there is a local alternative.
Happy to see Plugra and Organic Valley mentioned as “good” American butters. I use Plugra for most everything. There are some French butters I prefer but the import cost is high. KerryGold is fine.
Being from Northern Ireland, I always find it fascinating that American's think kerrygold butter is fancy. It's just our standard butter here and down south.
I'd say yes and no. It's on the pricier side compared to a lot of butters, but people here seem to buy an awful lot of "almost butter" products like Dairygold and Kerrymaid, which add some oil.
I really miss the half spherical sea salt president butter from France. When I lived there I would finish one per one to two weeks. It is tastes sooo good and I don't know why. Also really interesting how this butter sweats. No idea why.
I tried for a long time to find it in LA but no luck. Sure you can find the boxy President butter but it is not the same.
I second this, I'm in France and I specifically do not buy this President butter because it is too good and reminds me of my childhood.
I know it will disappear quickly in my fridge, along with my honey pot.
I first heard about the higher-fat French butter when I read about a French pastry chef/baker who moved to Canada, only to have difficulty replicating her pastries using local Canadian butter.
Based on the comments in this thread I went today and bought Kerrygold (salted sweat cream butter) and ran a taste test against generic Kirkland. (I'm in the US so this is US butter.) I ate each one directly, by itself.
Maybe I'm an uncultured barbarian, but... the difference is not nearly as large as the comments here seem to suggest. I can taste the difference, but I have to think about it. And the difference honestly seems small enough that I'm not sure I'd successfully distinguish them in a blind test.
Try some Belgian butter if you can get your hands on it. It's less widely available French, but its excellent and doesn't carry a Francophile premium …
Also, ghee! Also cultured butter!
So many great butter and butter-adjacent products out there …
McGee (in On Food and Cooking) talks about a third variety: British butter. It has the dehydrated qualities of French butter but without the cultured flavor. It’s not better or worse, just different, and another excellent addition to the toolkit.
As an aside it’s always perplexed me why we talk about the fat content of butter when it’s the water that’s playing the role of modifying taste, texture, and steam generating potential. It’s like talking about the water content of wine being 88% when you’re really interested in the other half of the equation — the alcohol content!
Growing up in Britain standard butter was uncultured and salted. British/Irish/New Zealand/Danish butter brands were all in the supermarket and all tasted pretty similar to me. US butter doesn't seem to taste of anything at all but I can usually get Kerrygold. I assume it's just because the rainy climate in northwestern Europe / New Zealand means the cows are mostly fed on grass.
Country Life Butter is the only one I remember. It's the British equivalent to Ireland's Kerrygold and New Zealand's Anchor as the brand was started by a consortium of the Milk Marketing Board and the large dairies.
Though apparently Anchor is now produced in the UK for the UK market.
> In the United Kingdom, Anchor block butter was imported from New Zealand until August 2012 when Arla Foods UK, the British licensee, transferred production to a local factory at Westbury, Wiltshire, using British cream.[6]
It was fine as far as I recall, probably the same stuff as in the supermarket brands. Guess it never made sense to focus on exports since as a highly industrial economy Britain imports almost half of its food.
Agriculture is only 0.7% of Britain's economy compared to 5.7% in New Zealand, 4.5% in Denmark, and 1.2% in Ireland (though Irish GDP in reality maybe 40% lower since multinationals tend to report income there for tax benefits, so 2% may be a better estimate.)
I think UK is not that much difference in that a lot of the GDP actually goes to finance. Although probably not as dramatic as 40%. But still, yes Arg is a rather week sector in UK.
Financial services are a big part of the UK economy but the lawyers and bankers get paid and then spend money in the UK.
Ireland’s very low corporate tax rate makes it attractive for multinational companies to structure their operations so that earnings are booked in the country even though little in the way of work is done there (perhaps through intellectual property charges.) This is only viable for a small country like Ireland because it can attract a proportionately larger amount of earnings with its low tax rate.
I was thinking most British butter tastes ok pretty much regardless of brand. I guess it's the rain/grass thing as you say. I prefer it to French butter myself.
Took me a long time to realize the spreadable kind of "butter" that comes in a tub isn't properly butter. They put all kinds of additives in to make it spreadable, usually seed oils. For example, Lurpak spreadable "butter" is 26% rapeseed oil.
Actual butter is the kind that comes wrapped in foil or paper. It's a little harder to spread but you just have to knead it with the flat of a knife against the edge of a plate to soften it up.
I had repeatedly heard that preparing your own butter is a waste of time because it wouldn't taste much different than store-bought varieties, but I suspect this doesn't apply to the cultured variant. It's possible to make cultured butter and buttermilk using kefir. I intend to try this and then... make croissants or something. Considering the price of milk/cream vs a stick of grass-fed cultured "European-style" butter, worth a try.
We sometimes make our own butter and it is our favourite to be honest but the problem is it only lasts about a week (unless you salt it, which we don't) so we break it up into small chunks and freeze it
I long thought that the main difference between US and French butter was that US butter was from fresh cream and French, from sour cream, maybe only slightly sour.
In the US, I get "unsalted" butter, sometimes recommended for dessert cooking, and sense that it has a little more flavor than salted butter, maybe is a little closer to French sour cream butter.
I'm willing to bet there's a weird trick you can do with some European butter wrapper to rival "land o' lakes" (having seen a 1990 film called "the nasty girl" about German denialism of war guilt which features analogous silliness with banknotes)
Australian butter is great. But I still love beurre d'isigny and lurpak unsalted from time to time.
I always try to pick the butter with highest fat content, but unfortunately most packages here in the US don't even specify the percentage.
I have to go by "fat % of daily recommendation per serving" which seems to vary highly based on what serving size each manufacturer envisions.
Does anybody have an easier system for this?
Well they are still forced to reproduce so that their offsprings can killed quickly (and sold as pricier calf meat) so that their milk can be used for making butter you eat on an other continent.
I wouldn't mix in "ethics" here, but the rest is true. Butter tastes good.
Ethics is not an all-or-nothing proposition. I think the idea that ethics doesn't come into this until you're approaching Jainist levels of respect for life is not just wrong, but counter-productive.
If you're going to eat butter, is it not inarguably better to get it from cows that could go outside and enjoy nature and eat grass; rather than cows that were subject to factory farming?
Would it be better again to be vegan? Sure; no argument there...
But the difference between the horrors of factory farming versus the much milder horrors of traditional farming is vast.
It's honestly quite surprising to me that anyone (other than a big agri PR goon) would take issue with pointing out the quality of the farmed animal's life as an ethical concern.
Im a dairy farmer living in castletownbere Ireland doing work remote at MIT. Actually we're in a little village called allihies a wee bit outside. Its a beautiful area. My family have run the farm since the 1920s. What you said is frankly incitement to violence against my family.
We love our cows and they live good long lives on our hills and meadows overlooking the sea. No regular farmer i know would ever do anything you said in your message.
Good that there are farmers like your family. By no means did I want to point to any individual's family, and certainly didn't say that this is the only way.
For the rest, unfortunately, as any mammal, cows only start producing milk when they become pregnant, and then stop later. Since feeding and raising the calves are more expensive than selling them for their meat, they rather do that on bigger / profit optimized farms. This procedure is hard to be thought of ethical.
Other farms also keep a breed that was already "genetically engineered" to simply produce more milk (called diary cows/diary cattle). Probably less extreme, ethically still challengable.
I live in Switzerland and this is one of the hot topics w.r.t. animal exploitation / sustainable farming and food production.
So next time you find yourself in the unlucky situation you have to eat someone other's / mass produced diary product, you might want to take this into consideration. Solution? Not yet, to my knowledge. Systematic problems would need systematic solution.
Protected designation of origin is both the worst and the best innovation of the European Union. On the one side, it allows me to easily discern if for example a bottle of olive oil is probably going to be decent without having to do research or falling prey to fancy marketing. Obviously it's great that these local industries are protected and they are motivated to retain extraordinary quality so people keep picking them over non-PDO products.
On the other hand.. it's blocking access to feta cheese to all of Europe. Feta cheese only keeps for maybe a day and there's no efficient way to get it from Greece to European supermarkets before it's turned. Now that we finally have super fresh food in our supermarkets, feta cheese stands out in that it's simply impossible to get fresh outside of Greece.
Nothing stops dairy companies from making a similar product and selling it, but without the "feta" name. Which is exactly what they do (you can find many "white cheese" varieties in central europe, complete with a blue/white colour theme and ancient greek geometric patterns, same with wannabe greek yoghurt).
Of course they never taste the same, as they were made with milk not produced in greece, and without the generations of tradition and knowledge. Hence why the PDO makes perfect sense.
In the US they sell sawdust and call it parmigiano. This is a disgrace.
> On the other hand.. it's blocking access to feta cheese to all of Europe. Feta cheese only keeps for maybe a day and there's no efficient way to get it from Greece to European supermarkets before it's turned. Now that we finally have super fresh food in our supermarkets, feta cheese stands out in that it's simply impossible to get fresh outside of Greece.
I'm sorry but that is not right. I'm Greek and I make cheese, although feta is not my specialty. Feta can last for weeks in the refrigerator, and it can be aged for a year or more before it is sent to market. Perhaps you are thinking of a different Greek cheese? There are some varieties of anthotyro (a whey cheese, made as a byproduct of making feta and other Greek cheeses) that do not last very long. But, the general rule is that with modern refrigeration technology most cheese, from most countries, can travel around Europe without trouble.
"Fresh" feta is also a bit of a misconception. Traditionally, feta is aged in wooden barrels, in 18 degrees Celsius. In modern days, market forces limit the aging period to the absolute minimum of three months, but you can still find plenty of traditional producers who age their feta for a lot longer. When we're talking about cheese, "fresh" refers more to the taste and organoleptic characteristics of the product, rather than how soon it is consumed after production. So three-month old feta cheese will often be referred to as "fresh" even if it's ... three months old.
In my understanding, what really blocked "access to feta cheese to all of Europe" was, for a long time, the production of cheese called "feta" by French, German and Danish companies, who made "feta" with cheap, industrially bred cow's milk, until the PDO for Greek feta was established. Those inferior "feta" cheeses confused European consumers, for whom after all feta is not a tradition and they can't be expected to know what feta is supposed to be like, and contrived to keep the real stuff out of the European market.
Of course, if you ask me, the kind of fully PDO feta that can be found in most European markets today is not much better than the cow's milk "feta" made by those non-Greek producers, even if it's made in Greece and while (nominally) respecting the PDO regulations, but that's another, and vary painful discussion. Suffice it to say that adulteration of milk for feta with cow's milk bought in the cheap from other Balkan countries is a thing.
It definitely is feta, but it's old. It's also definitely good, I don't think even Greek people would object to it. Obviously eating feta that's made the same morning you eat it isn't a feasible thing to always do. It's just not as good as fresh feta.
It's me again, Greek cheesemaker. You can't eat feta the morning you make it! At that point it's not even cheese, just slightly compressed and dehydrated curd. You have to wait at least three months until that curd tastes and smells like feta. For feta to develop its character it has to be aged for at least that long in brine, preferrably in wooden barrels that allow the characteristic surface cultures to grow.
You can eat myzithra the day you make feta, myzithra being a whey cheese that is traditionally made with the whey left over from making feta, and typically served at the dinner table of the cheesemaker's family. Now, fresh myzithra is a heavenly thing to eat and most people indeed will not be able to experience it, until they have the necessary connections to a handsome and intelligent Greek cheesemaker :P But you can buy even myzithra at the supermarket, thanks to the wonders of modern refrigeration technology.
Why are you saying that feta must be eaten fresh? I think you're mixing it up with myzithra, or some other cheese that's usually eaten fresh. Myzithra, or anthotyro, look very much like feta, and even have similar taste, since they're made from the same milk, and (if you make it the traditional way) by the same person as the feta.
Thank you! I think you're right and I'm mistaken. I'm basing it off one time eating a gyros in a residential neighbourhood in Athens that had a delicious soft cheese in it that tasted like feta but was not it. Someone told me I had to get it fresh, and I could never find it in supermarkets. I figured the Greek were hiding the good stuff from us, but your explanation makes way more sense.
I'll try and find Myzithra or Anthotyro next time I'm in Greece!
Edit: it sounds dumb since it was just a gyros, but this gyros was so legendary I'm still thinking about it ten years later, and I've been to Greece multiple times since then, though never again to Athens.
I once stayed in agro-hotel and they had their own butter for breakfast. It was very white, with just a slightest tint of yellow. Turned out yellow color in supermarket butter is added with carotine.
Decent butter on toast is still one of my favorite basic snacks. Sometimes I use olive-oil instead. Add some salt too. Anything else is just extra (fresh onion, tomato, cheese, honey).
I do the same but generalize a little and have: 2/3 cup red wine vinegar. 2 cups olive oil. 1/3 cup Dijon mustard (adds flavor and keeps the oil and vinegar from separating, i.e., acts like an emulsifier). 1 T (tablespoon) minced garlic. 1 T Worcestershire sauce. 1/4 cup bottled, minced, dried Parsley. Some salt and pepper.
Uh, for the red wine vinegar and olive oil, I just buy the cheapest, in ~1 gallon jugs.
I don't bother to refrigerate it.
1.5 t (teaspoon) on toast is good!
Right, it's vinegar/oil ratio 1/3, traditional.
Right, some French cooking sources would say it's a version of Sauce Vinaigrette.
And as I recall from an old story about California, might add crushed anchovies and an egg and serve it over Romaine lettuce with Parmesan cheese and toast cubes (croutons with the vinaigrette). Artichoke hearts are another possible addition.
Yeah, mustard + olive-oil + vinegar & salt is really quite tasty actually and it's very fast to make and spread on bread/salad. But I am talking basics that take me under 2 minutes to make.
For example pasta: boil, add olive-oil + salt & pepper. Or soup: boil onions, carrots & potatoes + oil. I like these basics.
At a restaurant supply house, get a good
16 quart pot, heavy stainless steel with a
3-layer bottom and a lid.
Get ~1 kg of red potatoes, rinse, dry, cut
into bite-sized pieces, place in a large
cast iron frying pan, add ~1 cup olive
oil. Add some pepper. Toss, place
uncovered in 450 F oven for 40 minutes,
toss, cook another 20 minutes, drain the
oil, place the cooked potatoes in the pot.
Make dice from ~1500 kg of yellow globe
onions, place in the cast iron pan, add
the oil (should be ~1 cup), place over
medium heat, occasionally stir.
When the onions have given up much of
their water as steam and started to brown,
drain out the oil and add the cooked
onions to the pot.
Add ~1 kg celery.
Add ~500 g of the white part of some
leeks.
Add ~30 ounces of carrots (thus,
completing the trilogy), peas, green
beans, corn, all canned, with their
liquid.
Add 4 pounds (two packages, each 2 pounds)
of Walmart's frozen peas carrots, beans,
and corn or 5 pounds of Bird's Eye's
version.
Add ~500 kg of green cabbage, cut to
eating size.
Add two cans of crushed tomatoes, about
794 g per can.
Add
1 cup parsley
1/2 cup Thyme
1/2 cup Basil
1/2 cup minced garlic
1/2 cup Chicken Base
Stir the pot.
Might add ~1 or 2 quarts of water.
Add cover.
Over medium heat, with occasional stirring
to make the temperature relatively
uniform, bring to ~200 F.
Done. Now have ~14 quarts of soup. If
need to freeze the soup, use 2 quart
plastic containers. The soup freezes
well. About 20 ounces make a filling meal
and has about ~250 C.
For eating 20 ounces, maybe add some salt,
Worcestershire sauce, and hot sauce (say,
20 g of each). Might serve with toast,
and dip the toast in the soup.
Kinda unrelated, but I recently found out Lidl's Irish Butter is made in Germany. Thought this would fall under EU Place of Origin Denomination Rules and thus not allowed.
I don't think "Irish Butter" is protected under those rules like say "champagne" is
The country of origin regulations would apply though - does it say very openly "made in Germany" on the packet? If not then it would likely fall foul of those rules.
EU regulations require any product where the consumer might be led to belive the country of origin is one place but is actually another, must be labelled.
Something called "Irish Butter" would have to be labeled as coming from elsewhere if it wasn't Ireland in order to comply.
Now I'm curious what you thought when you tasted butter for the first time, and, since it's the topic, whether it was American butter, a European one, or from somewhere else.
Likely European since I was in the army. Remember having it on bread and dipping that in a soup. At the time I didn't know there was more than Heinz tomatoe soup. Anyway it was delicious. I hated marg so always avoiding having any, even on toast. But I liked butter.
All this talk about kerrygold has given me a stiffy out of remembrance of the one and only COUGAR GOLD cheese. I love dairy products so much its unreal.
Am I the only one to find butter disgusting? It's just a blob of fat.
Now what really blows my mind is to learn that for some people, more fat is better.
I haven't tasted butter since I was a kid, some 25+ years ago. Maybe now I would find the _flavor_ delicious (doubt it) but so what? There's many things which might be delicious that I don't to put in my body.
EDIT: I'm European living in the USA - seems relevant to this thread.
Once, in Italy, my family was served a straight up chunk of lamb fat. My dad took one for the team and gulped it. I was grateful at the time, but later in life I discovered pork shoulder, with its drippy cracklin... and now I wish I could go back to that little albergo and try their lamb fat.
