Question about British butter

[HonestyBox]

Okay, so when I go to Italy and buy a slab of butter it is white and delicious. When I buy butter here, even though I get the best quality/organic butter I can find it is yellow and has a very 'buttery' taste that I don't always find that appealing - especially when eating it with bread and jam. How can butter be so different between countries and can I get an 'Italian' butter or similar in the UK?

Hope the collective mumsnet brain can answer this for me.

it is in part the salt, so try an unsalted brand like lurpak or president. you can buy italian butter in some delis but it does go off quicker (takes the smell of the fridge in a couple of days)

Okay, thanks - didn't realise it was unsalted.

British and Irish butter tends to be a darker colour also because the cows are fed primarily on a grass diet, so their milk has a higher carotence content, which then makes the butter a yellow colour. The white colour you get from French or Scandinavian butter is due to the fact the cows are more likely to be indoors.

There are two types of butter - lactic and sweetcream.

Most butter here is sweetcream - it is very yellow. Lactic butter has a lactic culture, which gives it its unique taste, and it's much paler in colour.

You need to look for Lurpak or President.

More information here

And colour is nothing to do with cows being kept indoors!

"Président Butter

It appears that it was the Vikings who were the first to introduce butter to Normandy, France, a region well-known for the high quality of its dairy products.

Président Butter is a lactic butter (unsalted or salted) made with milk from the Normandy region in France. Lactic butter is made from whole milk which has been fermented with lactic acid. The most notable characteristic of "lactic" butter is that it has a low moisture content and tangy flavor which some people prefer to sweet cream butter. Normandy butter is lavishly used in gastronomic specialties.

The distinctive flavor of Président butter can be probably attributed to the fact that their cows are allowed to graze in the lush, fertile, rolling green fields of this beautiful region of France."

(Quote from epinions.com)

Thank you BIWI, you have solved a mystery that has been irking me for a while. I'm off to get me some lactic butter.

I didn't even realise this. Usually buy Lurpak and really like it. This week, due to special offer I bought Anchor and it's really really buttery, quite off puttingly so. Makes sense now :)

Well, there you go. I cannot stand anchor butter - too yellow and too buttery. DP can't stand president as he likes salty butter. So I buy both

how do you all know this lol!!!

i want butter now!!

so calorie wise....butter v margarine.....any ideas??

Margarine is an evil cocktail of chemicals.

I read somewhere recently that if you only eat butter on a couple of slices of bread a day, you'd only save 35 cals by switching to the evil chemical stuff.

Lactic butter is usually 'cued' by silvery packaging whereas sweetcream is usually gold/yellow/cream. Supermarket brands most often follow these cues (although not always.)

i'll switch then! i even have a BUTTER DISH ready waiting!!

in the fridge or out?

Out. We don't have margerine or spread. They are just nasty. Our butter (which has large lumps of sea salt in it) lives out of the fridge on the worktop. This rule is usually adhered to unless I am having toast when I take the cold butter out and slice it off.

Whitecherry - just eat butter but less of it , that's what I do. I have hideous memories of margarine from growing up through the 80s and to me it will always be beyond the pale - always hated it and bought butter as soon as I went to university. Mum always had some of that 'Stork' in a gold wrapper for baking and a tub of yellowing hideous margarine for spreading, bleugh. Be warned that the older generation tend to still bake with this sort of rubbish and have an aversion to butter as they were so effectively convinced of the superior health qualities of marg by the industrial food producers - so beware of baked goods at family gatherings I would say.

Margarine also has palm oil in it.

Eat butter and help the orangutans

We used that Olivio stuff until the documentary I saw recently. I then decided that the same amount of less of the real stuff was far better than the collection of shitey chemicals that passes for 'spreads'

Never knew that about the colour of the wrapper although of course it now makes sense :) How do you get so knowledgeable on the lowly subject of butter? :)

margarine and other spreads are vile vile vile.

Stick to butter and keep it out of the fridge so you can spread it thinly.

When you're in marketing/market research, you get involved in all kinds of things!

I did a lot of work on butter when I worked in advertising.

I have lots of trivial knowledge about all kinds of products. Sadly little of this comes in really useful, but I can often pop up on threads like this one

It's awesome, BIWI.

Awesome. I love it when people are experts on things

Butter butter butter!

Marg is a wierdness. Evil science and evil magic colluding to poison us. Blurgh.

biwi, so is the sweetcream butter churned? Or is lactic churned aswell as cultured iyswim?

Might be wrong here but I think it is actually illegal to sell margarine in Uk as opposed to veg spread.I only put butter on toast and not in my butties so I only ever use butter and not spread (eeeeugh the thought of eating it)

All butter is churned, surely? Lactic just has a culture added, AFAIK