Better Butter — The Thrifty Table

Regardless of the headlines of the last 5 years or so, butter is loaded with saturated fat, which is not good for your health…but it tastes sooooo good! What to do? Read about why saturated fat is still bad for you (despite the optimistic press) and how you can still get that buttery taste while saving your arteries and your money. Now that’s hard to beat.

The finished product-better butter in a glass container.

C’mon. A whole pound of crimini mushrooms, chopped up with some shallot, fried in butter until wilted, and served over pasta with a sprinkle of parmesan? Fresh-steaming-home-baked rolls with butter at your winter dinners? I know I know. How could butter be any better? Well, it could be better for your health. Wait. Can it be? I think it can, so I need to get the word out immediately.

Actually, there’s good reason to ask: wasn’t butter exonerated a few years ago? Remember 2014? That picture on the cover of Time magazine showing a gorgeous curl of butter on a crisp, black background? Remember that New York Times article with the catchy title “Butter is Back”? It said that new studies don’t support the idea that butter increases the risk of heart disease. The headline was echoed all over the media from Fox News to the PBS NewsHour, creating a lot of doubt about the purported evils of butter. But the truth is, butter is full of saturated fat. Remember that Joker of the 80’s? Despite Time magazine, the best sources I found still say that saturated fat is the Joker of fats, laying waste to your blood vessels and putting you at higher risk of a heart attack. In all the hubbub about polyunsaturated fats and omega-3’s and their cousins omega-6’s and God forbid alpha lipoic acid (I have to pay you 2 cents just to read that word), our culture had seemed to forget about saturated fats, and then the Time article signaled that we could relax and eat all the butter we wanted.

Why the disconnect between my sources and the media? One of the problems with the scientific studies that sparked the Time cover was that they were poorly designed¹. How? Let’s say we are trying to find out if saturated fats are bad for people. We’d want to cut saturated fat out of some people’s diets and leave it in the diet of others. Then we could track the health outcomes of both groups and see if the saturated-fat-eaters fared worse. The problem is, when you cut something out of someone’s diet, you have to put something else back in, so they have enough to eat. What to put in? Let’s say you put in vegetables. It might be something about putting in the vegetables that changes the health outcome of the test subjects, not cutting out the saturated fat.

Now, in the 80’s and 90’s, the cultural wisdom said that all fat was bad for you, hence the ill-advised low-fat-everything trend. We know better now: fats are really necessary in our bodies to do things like build neurons. But when these studies were started, fat in general was still the archenemy, so what did the researchers replace the calories from saturated fat with? Carbohydrates. Further, the scientists did not control what kind of carbohydrates the test subjects ate. And in our culture, we eat mostly refined carbohydrates, which is more than likely what the test subjects did. Refined carbohydrates are devoid of nutrients and fiber. It would take a whole other article to fully explain why this is bad news, so I’ll short-cut for now: current scientific understanding says that these kinds of carbohydrates do all sorts of bad things for your body. So…here’s the situation. You take out one bad player (the Joker: saturated fat) and put in another bad player (Lex Luthor: refined carbohydrates), and what do you get? A bad comparison. It would look like cutting out saturated fat did absolutely nothing for the test subjects’ health, which is exactly what the scientists observed.

Well, this all sounds bad for butter, which is 66% saturated fat. Can we make it better? One way is to feed the cows we milk only grass. When farmers do this, the butter is not lower in saturated fat. Oops. But it is lower in the types of saturated fats that raise blood cholesterol² and it is higher in something called omega-3 fatty acids (up to 2 times as much)³. Omega-3’s have gotten a lot of press lately, so I’ve been suspicious of them for a while, but my recent research indicates they are good for you. Remember those neurons I was talking about in your brain? Omega 3’s are big players in the neuron building process. They are important for your body in other processes as well, for example controlling inflammation and inhibiting the development of atheromas (yeah, I had to look that one up—it’s those plaques that form in your arteries that cause heart attacks). So, butter made from the milk of pastured cows is better for you than from the milk of grain-fed cows.

But pastured butter still has quite a lot of saturated fat. Here’s another problem: it’s also very expensive. I buy Organic Valley pastured butter, which is available at Whole Foods in Colorado Springs for $2.00 per ½ c. (stick). Conventional butter? $0.92 per stick. Organic butter? $1.25 per stick. Yeah, it’s expensive. Darn. But there’s a solution for both problems. Mix together your butter with an equal amount of unsaturated oil (like canola or avocado or olive) and refrigerate it. You can keep that buttery taste, but you cut the saturated fat almost in half. The result? “Better Butter”!

Here’s how:

Buy the unsalted butter of your choice. Leave it out in a warm place in your kitchen until it is softened. This might take a few hours. I like to make it in the evening, after dinner, when the butter has been sitting out in the warm kitchen as I have been cooking. If your kitchen is cold (as mine is in the winter), you can put it near a hot burner on your stove. If it’s slightly melted at the start, that’s no problem.

My food processor with the softened chunks of butter

Pouring the oil into the running food processor

Put the butter, cut into several big chunks, into your food processor. Start blending, and while the blade is spinning, pour in an equal volume of oil to the butter you put into the processor. I like to do two sticks (one cup, and thus one cup oil) at a time.
If the butter is still stuck against the side after a few 10’s of seconds, stop the food processor and scrape the sides to get the butter chunks back into the mix. Continue this blend/scrape method until you have formed a liquidy-butter ambrosia. Mmmmmm.
As a last step, while the food processor is running, shake a couple of pinches of salt into the Better Butter. You don’t need much—this is just to enhance the flavor a bit.
Finally, pour/scrape the result into a container and keep it in the refrigerator.

Unfortunately, you really do need a food processor for this. I’m so sorry if you don’t have one, but this works very poorly in the low-cost blenders I have tried.

The result is a healthier version of butter that you can use in cooking, baking, or simply to spread on your home-baked rolls. You can adjust the salt to your taste. If you are on a low-salt diet, you can leave it out. Plus there’s this big bonus: when you refrigerate the mix, it is the consistency of the spreadable “I can’t believe it’s not butter” sold in the dairy case at your grocery store…but no additives and very little salt. So you can just pull it out, spread it on your toast, and be good to go. It’s also cheaper than butter. Oils are generally much less expensive than butter, so if you want to get the advantage of pastured butter, you can cut the cost by adding an economical oil. Mine, made with canola oil, is $1.31 per ½ c., quite close to organic butter.

And how does it taste? Just like butter! There really is no difference that I can discern. If there’s any disadvantage, it gets soft if you leave it out on the counter during breakfast. However, keeping the Better Butter in a glass container helps keep it colder and less soft.

So can butter be better? Yes it can!!!

Thanks to our family friend Linda Renfro for teaching us how to make Better Butter back around 1980.

For an excellent review of the 2014 Time article, see Dr. Marion Nestle’s blog post: No butter is not back.

References

¹ Liebman, B., 2017, The heart of the matter: Which foods protect your arteries?, Nutrition Action Healthletter, November 1, p. 3-5.

² Daley, C. A., Abbott, A., Doyle, P. S., Nader, G. A., and Larson, S., 2010, A review of fatty acid profiles and antioxidant content in grass-fed and grain-fed beef, Nutrition Journal, v. 9, no. 10, 12 p.

³ Robinson, J., 2011, Pasture Perfect, Vashon Island Press, Vashon, Washington, 152 p.