Tags
butter, butter or margarine, butter shelf life, healthy butter, how vegetable oil is made, saturated fats and health, vegetable oil processing, vegetable oils
We are very keen on butter, but butter with no barcodes is a tricky item to come by during the winter months in our goat and sheep-rearing part of the world. Luckily, we did find some “beurre d’Échiré” at the market cheesemonger, who cuts it from an enormous wheel. At Euro 17,90 per kilo ($23.40), we gingerly ask for a fine slice to have as a treat on the weekends. The rest of the week, we drown our sorrows in olive oil and cook with duck fat.
A lot of people are still wary of butter and, given the relentless margerine-marketing and ill-guided demonisation of saturated fats for over five decades, this is not surprising. But the butter tides are finally churning, and the harmful effects of vegetable oils omnipresent in barcoded food (more on this in a future post) is now more widely acknowledged by conventional medicine. Readers believing that margarine is a natural product should watch how it is made, and then consider how the misnamed “vegetable oils” (in fact they come from beans, grains or seeds) have been industrially processed in the first place, following the diagram below. Trans-fats anyone?
Call us old-fashioned, but we prefer an age-old product that comes with a quite simpler flow chart: take milk cream and churn. Shortly we’ll beat our own butter – once we can source our barcode-free spring cream!
Being routinely stored for up to a year, the main issue with barcoded butter may be its age. Over the months sitting in cold storage, butter loses important aroma components, develops lipid peroxidation and may build up hazardous levels of styrene from wrapping materials (source). A point we made previously with inferior meat coming from grain-fed cattle also applies here: the cow’s diet determines the fat composition of butter in a linear relationship. So look for butter from grass-fed animals (ideally organic) as your best barcoded choice. This recent article may be useful in this regard.