Food & Drink

No Name butter any good?

  • Last Updated:
  • Nov 16th, 2020 6:32 pm
Deal Addict
May 30, 2010
2139 posts
1969 upvotes
antihero wrote: Since discovering 84 butter - it's the only thing I will use in making anything flaky or pastry like.

Quickly summed up by an old article by Chris Nuttall-Smith:

"Three or 4 extra per cent of fat content may sound like a trifling difference, but it's a massive one in the worlds of baking and chocolate making. Fat content affects butter's flavour (more fat, more flavour), delivers creamier texture, and raises butter's melting point. But most critically, fat content is a zero-sum proposition: The more fat a butter contains, the less room there is for water. Higher fat butter can contain between 10- and 20-per-cent less water than the usual stuff."
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/fo ... cle547827/

Basically less water equals flakier crusts and poofy pastries. Dunno - works for me.
Are referring to Stirling's Churn84 line? If so, pay attention to the nutritional information panel. It's 80% butterfat, not 84%, 8g of fat per 10g serving. It tastes good though.
https://stirlingcreamery.com/products/c ... alted-250g
Sr. Member
May 7, 2008
823 posts
383 upvotes
Toronto
I get Emerald Grasslands 84 butter. Various places sell it but I go to the bougie Fresh in the City store to get mine.
Deal Addict
Mar 8, 2004
1045 posts
895 upvotes
Kanata
I find NN butter more crumbly and less smooth than brands like Gay Lea so I tend to save it for baking or cooking where it's melted anyway. If it's not being melted I try to use the brand name such as baking cookies where you are beat sugar into it at room temp.
Member
Mar 22, 2020
392 posts
260 upvotes
Can someone share pictures of the current wrapper for NN butter? I am still really curious about the statement that it is the same as Gay Lea and want to see if they are using the Canadian dairy logo?
Deal Addict
Feb 22, 2016
4745 posts
4409 upvotes
Canoes4Fun wrote: Can someone share pictures of the current wrapper for NN butter? I am still really curious about the statement that it is the same as Gay Lea and want to see if they are using the Canadian dairy logo?
First put away the dairy cartel FUD cheatsheat you've been using. Then read this and learn something:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/fo ... cle547827/

Direct quote from the article, highlights mine:

Canada is a butter backwater, with less variety and quality and far higher prices than nearly any other food-loving nation. In Europe and the United States, it's available in myriad permutations, from gently nutty regional butters, to fragrant, seasonal butters made with the summer milk of a single herd, to extra high-fat "dry" compositions used in baking.
In Canada, butter is just butter. Give or take a few very minor variations, it's a monopoly-produced dairy commodity, the same from coast to coast.
And as Ms. Nouiran and scores of other top pâtissiers have realized, Canadian butter is uniformly made with a government-mandated 80-per-cent fat content, while most butter in Europe – the stuff that makes for great pastries – starts at 82 or 83 per cent. What's worse, Canada's government levies a 289.5-per-cent tariff on all but a tiny quantity of foreign butter.


So it's all the same weak watery cartel garbage no matter what the wrapper says. No Name, Lactantia, Gay Lea, all the same. With an almost 300% tax on it, what retailer other than a 1%er shop like McEwan (which does carry Irish and New Zealand butters) would bother to import foreign product?

I remember an article back in the 90's about a French chef in Toronto (maybe it was Marc Thuet?) who said he had to take Canadian butter, wrap it in tea towels, and hammer the hell out of it with a mallet so that the tea towel would absorb some of the excess water in order to get the fat content up to 84% so his recipes would work properly. Yeah, that bad.

You seem to be flooding the boards with cartel FUD. Why are you wasting bandwidth? You already have the CBSA doing your dirty work making damn sure there's no foreign product at your local Loblaws, there's nothing to see here.
Deal Addict
Sep 26, 2008
1053 posts
287 upvotes
Ottawa
Canoes4Fun wrote: Can someone share pictures of the current wrapper for NN butter? I am still really curious about the statement that it is the same as Gay Lea and want to see if they are using the Canadian dairy logo?
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