Reply With QuoteBack to the butter - do you buy it in tubs like margarine or just in blocks? I do buy butter in 250g blocks for baking - is this what you use?
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thanks, it should be an interesting discussion to follow
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Back to the butter - do you buy it in tubs like margarine or just in blocks? I do buy butter in 250g blocks for baking - is this what you use?
Yes Willow - that's it. The ingredients should say: cream & salt. It is hard and needs to be softened to room temperature...
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I get the harmony organic. I went to margarine for a long time because every butter I bought was rancid but then I tried the Mainland brand and it was Ok and the Harmony one has been ok too. I'm still scared of all the other brands. rancid butter is so yuck!
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OK, that's easy then!
Converting my DH will be hard work though, he is convinced that with a strong family history of heart disease those 'lower your cholesterol' margarines are going to save his life
How do you know if it's rancid and how do you stop it from happening? Will have to get a butter dish thingo, I don't have one.
Rancidity occurs when it goes off Willow my love. So just be careful that you either use it up in about 7 days OR just put out 75g at a time... As you know I live in Qld (though in a cool clime) and my butter is out on the bench in a butter dish all year around. There has admittedly been a couple of times that it has melted a bit - but not gone rancid...
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OK, it's pretty cool here in the winter months and very hot in the summer but I'm sure I'll work it out!
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I struggle to buy a brand I am happy with. I would buy Devondale (We are surrounded by Devondale farms), but it is only sold at one place in small blocks. There is Warrnambool butter, it is meant to be nice, but WCB did a bad thing with pricing to the farmers, so would rather avoid them for the moment. Oh dear, the ethics of butter.
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Yep, that's what I get, the same ones I use for baking. And I get the unsalted one. Much cheaper than actually buying a tub too!
There's only 2 of us and I just put a whole block in the container and leave it out of the fridge and we never have any problems!
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We have Mainland butter and I find that spreads easily. And no butter dish issues because it is just in the tub.
I think there is a bit of an art to spreading butter nicely across bread...you pick up the technique with practice.
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I didn`t know that about margarine, ewww I have actually been buying butter for a while (to DSS`s disgust) but DH brought a huge tub of margarine earlier in the week as he said it was much cheaper then butter, now I feel like throwing it.
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i have used butter for a LONG time.. last week i made my own butter and im thinking about doing it fairly regularly(not sure if i can keep up with my cooking requirements).
do you think i could whip up butter with olive oil to make it spread able?
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Oh, this doesn't surprise me at all.
I'm so glad to see that there are so many people on here who are able to use their own common sense rather than blindly falling for advertising hype. And those of you who have been listeningg to the hype in the past are open minded enough to reconsider.
I don't think I have ever bought margarine. I have always been suspiscious of it. Same goes for a lot of those so-called healthier products. Like low-fat, egg (and flavour-) free mayo,...
I am forever shaking my head at my in-laws who tell me how unhealthy my diet is, because I use real butter, have real sugar in my tea, I eat my christmas turkey with the skin on, I drink full cream (organic, unhomogenised) milk.
They however, eat cholesterol lowering margarine, drink diet soft-drinks, throw out the skin on the turkey (sacrilege if you ask me), drink no-fat milk with a gazillion of so-called vitamins added...
The clencher is, they constantly tell me how fattening all that stuff is, yet, they are the ones who are obese. Might I suggest it's the biscuits, cheesecakes, icecreams, puddings, etc. that they have multiple times a week.
They criticise me for salting my food while they happily tuck into a bowl of Smiths Crisps. Hello, what do you think is on those???
I strongly believe in eating foods that have been processed as little as possible. Of course I have processed stuff in the fridge and pantry, too. But the bulk of our diet is fresh meat, poultry, fish, vegetables and fruit.
I rather chop up some banana to add to my oats when making porridge, than buying the flavoured sachets. Can you believe that my MIL had to ask me how to make porridge??? Shouldn't it be the other way around? She grew up at a time that didn't know microwave porridge sachets.
Sorry, for the OT rant.
Sasa
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By the way, we mainly use Butter Soft, because it's spreadable without having oil added.
But, I want to buy organic butter from now on (it's so much tastier) aand that is soooo hard to spread. One thing that helps: buy (or bake) decent bread!!! Sorry, I am a little biased. I grew up in Germany, where we eat mainly bread that is a little firmer and denser (and often rye) than the typical Aussie bread.
The other thing is to try and plan ahead a little. Taking your butter out of the fridge 10 minutes before using it, makes a huge difference.
If you're like us and don't eat huge amounts of bread, you mgiht store it in the freezer. I take one slice out and butter it while it's still frozen. It's much easier to spread the butter on the hard frozen bread.
Sasa
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SS: that is my experience too: being told that I shouldn't eat so much full-fat food or put cream in my coffee etc by relatives who are twice my weight (I hover between 65 - 68kg and am 170cm tall). They kid themselves that eating margarine, low fat yogurt etc is going to help when they wash it down with over a litre of coke a day(I don't touch coke... it's almost as evil as Margarine). People definitely are strange.
Yep, butter that has only 2 ingedients: cream and water is the best if you can be organised enough to remove it from the fridge before you need it. And it tastes by FAR the best. I've never experienced rancidity yet although we have a very cool/dark walk in pantry in an older home which helps to keep things like butter/cheese at a healthy temp if left out.
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Bath, yes, people are strange. It just gets to me that they (IL's) are sooo happy to repeat what they have been told rather than thinking for themselves. They are not dumb people, but they just don't think to ever question the status quo.
By the way, i do occasionally drink a coke. But I don't kid myself believing it is healthy. I know it is bad for me, but sometimes I gotta live on the edgeI'm not perfect. But I try to do the right thing at least most of the time.
There are also some lovely cultured butters out there. They have cream, salt and "culture" on the ingredient list. They have a slight tang to them. They are probably the closest in taste to traditional butter. In the past, cream was saved after milking the cows. After a few days, when enough cream had accumulated, this slightly fermented cream was used to make butter. These days, we use pasteurised cream to make butter. So this natural souring of the milk does not occur. So a culture can be either added to the cream or the finished butter to mimic this natural process in which the milk sugars turn into lactic acid.
Sasa
Sasa - you've gotta read Nourishing Traditions.... I think you would like it...
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I have seen people mention this book on BB quite a bit lately. It sounds intriguing. And it sounds like yet another book DH's family will shake their head about quietly thinking "when has she turned into a naive tree-hugging hippie?" They thought I was sooo strange for not wanting an epi when I had DD... Let alone when I decided to not let DD drink tap water anymore because QLD had started to fluoridate. So this will just be too much to handle for them ;-). And i love it. Even if they disagree, maybe it will at least make them think twice... I should get this book - just to stir the pot - and i might really like it in the end!
Sasa
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