14 December 2012

European style butter

Last Saturday I had an urge to make cookies, I was planning on making some type of Christmas cookies, but a friend suggested I try a chocolate chip cookie recipe of a coffee shop in NYC. This article states that the key to the best chocolate chip cookies are three fold, refrigerating dough overnight, using high quality chocolate, and European style butter (I read another article today that agreed with the first two suggestions, but the third was adding sea salt sprinkles on top... yumm). I agreed to try it out and headed to Whole Foods for butter. I found the European Style butter, priced at $3.99 for the 8 oz package (after talking to my sister the baker its a good thing I don't know how much butter normally costs).

As far as I can tell the only difference in this butter is an extra 4% butterfat. The higher butterfat has a more intense flavor and is richer because there is less water. Euro style is also cultured (there seemed to also be cultured butter that wasn't euro style) which means it is slowly ripened through introducing live cultures (i.e., probiotic).

From what I can tell its mostly used in pastries (to make them more flakey) and directly on bread (because it has more flavor).  

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I followed the recipe, but I only refrigerated the dough for an hour or so because I was hungry. The cookies came out great. Perfect texture and they really were full of butter taste.

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I'm not sold on the Euro butter though, seems like my tummy didn't like it (or maybe I had too many cookies?).

2 comments:

  1. your cookies look great. Are you bring some home or did you eat them all? MOM

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  2. 3.99 isn't bad for a little at home experimentation, but I think I'll stick with 1.99 for 16 oz of butter. Some think I'm crazy enough with the vegan and gluten free cookies.

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