Ingredient investigation: French butter

As the vegan journey progresses I’ve realised that I need to address the question of suitable French alternatives with a little more focus. In pre-vegan days I loved the taste of creamy President butter on a warm croissant, however my first attempt at baking cakes in France, for a charity event, resulted in a bit of a butter crisis. In the UK I was used to that old favourite Stork, a throwback to my childhood. Here I searched the supermarket for something similar and came away with Astra, which rather appropriately rhymes with ‘disaster’. It didn’t cream with sugar and the resultant cake mixture was inedible. I turned to the Facebook forums for advice and discovered that most British home cooks here use butter – but which one? The choice on the supermarket shelves is vast.

A google search for French butter came up with numerous hits for: ‘why is French butter better? What makes French butter stand out?’ As I’d started my search in response to my frustration with finding the right type of butter for cooking clearly I’d been missing something. I decided to read on! There’s a great article (in French) from QueChoisir – the French equivalent of Which? That unlocks the mysteries of buying butter in France.

True butter contains only two ingredients: crème pasteurisée and ferments lactiques. Anything else isn’t true butter. Allegedly, what makes French butter stand above its UK and US rivals is the butterfat content and production process. In France, by law, unsalted butter must contain 82% butterfat. UK butter, in contrast, only has to contain 80% butterfat. Consequently, French butter tends to contain less water and it is made with cultured cream using the barette process. In this traditional method, the cream is allowed to ‘ripen’ or ferment for a day or two before being churned, after which some cream is re-incorporated into the butter before the final washing process.

The best butters are said to come from Brittany, Normandy and the Poitou-Charente, an area just on the doorstep. Typical of the French there is an AOC accreditation for the best butters. The very best butter is said to be Bordier (available in Paris) and Echiré. I’ve seen neither round these parts but SuperU certainly has some AOC Charentaise butters. With my current move to veganism I wasn’t not too concerned about doing a taste test, my particular gripe was finding the right sort of butter for the Twilight cakes.

Research told me that there are three types of butter: sweet butter, which is common in the UK, a neutral tasting butter made without the fermentation process; lactic butter, which is the predominant European production method where the milk sugars are converted into lactic acid in a fermentation process; and whey butter, which has a lower fat content and is derived from the cheese production process, often called ‘traditional butter’.

 

French butter terminology

There’s no doubt that the French 82% butter is the real deal, and I shall be checking the labels closely. But SuperU has 217 latière products listed so what are all these other blocks sold in the same section of the chill cabinet with labels that are confusingly similar to good old beurre? They are a mixture of butter-related products with a lower butterfat percentage (ranging from 82% down to 15%) and the addition of half a dozen emulsifiers and thickeners, some vegetable fat based products and genuine margarine. The less fat, the more water the product contains and the more chemicals to make it stick together and spread.

Margarine was actually invented in France in 1869 when Hippolyte Mège-Mouries responded to Napoleon’s request for a butter replacement for the troops and lower classes. The name margarine comes from ‘margaric acid’. The original product was made from beef fat but then vegetable fats were introduced, and once the hydrogenation process was discovered margarine developed significantly from the 1950s onwards. Modern margarine is made from a variety of animal and vegetable fats, and mixed with skimmed milk and emulsifiers. Its popularity must have peaked in my childhood, as I remember we ate nothing else, and butter was considered to be unhealthy and fattening. However, the tide has now turned back to butter, especially those artisan brands like Echire.

Once I’d got to grips with the ingredients and the butterfat percentages I decided to have a look at some of the products we’d eaten in the past. The Astra-disaster turned out to be a vegetable-based margarine with a 70% fat level, this explains why it was impossible to cream with sugar. In the past, we’d been sucked in by a TV advert for St Hubert 41, a supposedly easy-to-spread unctuous butter, and had a phase of buying it; the ingredients breakdown showed this to be 50% vegetable oil, high water content plus seven additives including some milk-based.

The fact that many of the low fat or easy-to-spread butters and vegetable spreads contain milk-based ingredients makes them out of bounds for vegans. I’ve found that the best way to identify them is to look for the words LAIT or LATIERE in bold on the ingredients list. The bold is used to highlight allergy advice, in this case to show that it is not suitable for dairy-free diets. Out of the 217 products available on the local SuperU website I found three suitable for vegans, all labelled (on the front) as 100% vegetal: Tournolive, St Hubert Soja, and St Hubert Pur Vegetal.