Salted vs unsalted butter — which butter is better to beat into your batter? You'd
butter hold that thought while I tell you that this video is sponsored by Squarespace,
the all-in-one solution for building and running a website. All in one. It's like having salted
and unsalted butter combined, which really just makes it sound like slightly-less-salty
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Today's salted butter is vastly less salty than the butter most humans have eaten for
the thousands of years in which humans have been making salted butter. Salted butter used
to be way more salty. Understanding that can help one understand the surprisingly loaded
social dynamics around salted vs unsalted butter. It can also help you understand this
humble home cook's opinion that it doesn't really matter which kind of butter you have.
You can make either one work in most things, as long as you know what kind you have and
you adjust accordingly.
Milk, of course, has sodium in it naturally, and butter is made from milk. It's the fat
extracted from the cream, plus some leftover stuff from the cream — some water, proteins,
sugars, and minerals, including surely some trace amount of sodium. Why did people start
adding additional salt to the butter in the first place? Probably not for the taste.
"You know, salt is the ancient preservative, right? People used it with fish, and with
meat, and all kinds of foods."
This is Elaine Khosrova, a classically-trained pastry chef, and what, does she think she
wrote the book on butter? Oh wait, she did. It's called "Butter: A Rich History."
"So, butter was a natural to salt, if they wanted to keep it for any length of time.
The only exception to that is in India, and that region. To preserve their butter, they
boiled it down to evaporate off the liquid. When there's no water in butter, you don't
have bacteria that form there."
She's talking, of course, about ghee, and making ghee was a practical necessity in the
Indian subcontinent because it's super hot there. This can't exist in ambient temperatures
above like 90 Fahrenheit, 32 Celsius. It just melts. It's not surprising then that the Western
tradition of solid butter-making probably originates in northern Europe. Khosrova says
that the first European butter-makers of note were probably the Vikings, and the salted
butter that the Vikings made was saltier than the seas upon which their longboats sailed.
"About 10 times as much salt as we have right now. It would not have been edible, at all.
I mean, eventually it would be edible because then they would soak it in cold water to leach
out the salt."
Let's see what that would have tasted like — 10 times as salty as the salted butter
we have now. How much do we have now? Well, here's Land O' Lakes salted butter, the single
most popular make and model of butter in the United States. The label says it has 90 milligrams
of sodium per tablespoon, that's 14 grams. 90 divided by 14,000 is .64 percent salt.
Hmm. If that sounds a little low to you, you gotta remember that salt itself is only about
39 percent sodium. I totally didn't make that mistake when I was researching this video.
Salt is sodium chloride.
So we gotta see if I remember basic algebra. .39(x) = .64, divide both sides by .39, x
= 1.64. This butter is 1.64 percent salt. 10 times as salty as that would be 16.4 percent.
So, here's a tablespoon of unsalted butter. 14 grams. 16.4 percent of that is 2.3 grams.
Just to make the math easier on myself I'ma take away 2.3 grams of butter or thereabouts.
Replace it with about 2.3 grams of salt, that's about half a teaspoon of good ol' Morton Kosher
Salt, and ... yeah. That is so salty. You literally taste nothing but salt.
But that's the kind of preservative power you need for, say, the winter, when the animals
aren't lactating — oir if you're supplying your longboat for a lengthy cruise of the
Northumbrian coast. Slaughtering monks and pillaging their trinkets is very calorie-intensive
work, and this longboat is not gonna row itself back to Denmark, Bjorn.
Oh hey, you ever heard of pickled butter? Elaine Khosrova found a recipe for it in a
White House cookbook from the 19th century.
"They would take freshly made butter and wrap it in muslin, and then soak it in this brine
that was full of salt and a little bit of sugar. And that's how they would preserve
butter for the president."
Yum. Pretty extreme. But, again, that is probably for winter butter. Summer butter that you
might be making for relatively immediate consumption would probably need to be way less salty than
that, but it was still a lot saltier than this.
"If we go back even to medieval times, table butter was probably three times as salty as
the butter that we eat now and call salted butter."
OK, let's make some of that. 1.64 x 3 = 4.9 percent. .049 x 14 grams of butter = .68%
salt. Take that away from the butter, replace it with salt, and yeah, that's pretty salty,
but ... hold on, let me go get some bread.
I think that's pretty good, and this is what table butter was until pretty recently. In
these dairy industry trade publications from about a hundred years ago, people are talking
about their butter being 3 or 4 percent salt — that's 2-3 times as salty as the butter
that we have now — probably the minimum salt that you'd need to keep butter fresh
for more than a few days without refrigeration. So what changed between now and then? Refrigeration!
And industrialization — the growth of large-scale, temperature-controlled logistical networks
that could deliver fresh butter to way more people.
"Once butter started to be made in creameries, and then ever-bigger creameries, and then,
finally, factories, a selling point was to say, 'Our butter has less salt because we're
not covering up anything,' like rancidity, or just off flavors. There can be a lot of
different off flavors in butter. So they could say, 'We have less salt in our butter, because
it's super fresh."
And this also may have capitalized on a long-standing cultural notion that unsalted butter is fancier.
Because guess who'd been making unsalted butter this entire time? The fanciest people of all,
at least when it comes to food: the French.
"There were two particular regions outside of Paris where dairymaids would make a beautiful
unsalted butter that was also cultured, and they could sell it for twice, three-times
the price of regular salted butter."
"Cultured" in this context is one of these funny words that kinda sounds like what it
means, like "ostentatious." The word "ostentatious" is very ostentatious. "Cultured" butter is
not only enjoyed by people of high culture, it's also made with bacterial cultures. It's
fermented. It's tangy, like yogurt or cheese. Fermentation is an alternative means of food
preservation. And it also tastes real yummy. So yeah, the French love that, and at least
here in the Anglophone world we have a long-standing cultural idea that anything French is high
class.
"What I also uncovered in my research was that some wealthy families, if they didn't
live on a farm and have their own cows and their own butter-making, they would contract
with a local dairymaid to make unsalted butter just for them. She could bring a small batch
of unsalted butter if they wanted that at the table."
Makes sense, right? If something is scarce, it's expensive, and if something is expensive,
then rich people want it. Prior to refrigeration, unsalted butter that hasn't yet gone bad was
a luxury item.
You'd think that social attitude would be obviated by the advent of refrigeration. But
then something else happened in the 1960s and 70s.
"You had this phase where cooking gets a little bit more sophisticated, you know, thanks to
Julia Child and Jaque Pepin and, you know, people who came along and introduced the American
palette to unsalted butter — not just at the table, but cooking as well."
Speaking for myself, I got introduced to unsalted butter a couple of decades later by this guy
— Alton Brown — specifically this episode of "Good Eats." I think Alton Brown's great
contribution to American gastronomy was that he pushed the precision of the professional
kitchen into the home. He taught us how to measure stuff by weight instead of volume,
and he taught us to use unsalted butter for the sake of standardization. If you cook with
unsalted butter, you can better control the amount of salt going into your food.
I love that man, and I am obviously, uh, indebted to him, but a lot of my "journey" in the kitchen
has been about unlearning a lot of the things that Alton Brown taught me. Take butter. I
used to cook with unsalted butter exclusively because Alton told me to. But my wife always
wanted to have salted butter in the house, because that's what she likes to spread on
bread.
Me personally, I'm a big fan of heterogeneous seasoning. I take a piece of bread, smear
on some unsalted butter and then sprinkle on some super-coarse flaky salt — that,
to me, is far more delicious than something with homogenous seasoning throughout it. It's
for the same reason that a pretzel with big rocks of salt on it is more delicious than
a bread that just has the salt evenly dissolved through the dough.
But Lauren likes salted butter on her bread and she is hardly alone in that, so for years
I tried to have both kinds of butter in the house at all times, which was pain, and I'd
often get caught with one and not the other. So one day I was just like, screw it, I'm
just gonna use salted butter and account for the salt when I am cooking.
You can account for it with math. 90 milligrams of salt in a tablespoon, 8 tablespoons in
a stick, 8 x 90 is 720 milligrams of salt in this stick right here. That's a pinch.
Here's every salted butter they had at my grocery store. Three of them have 90 milligrams
of sodium per tablespoon. The Vermont Creamery has 80 milligrams and the Kerrygold from Ireland
has 100 mils. The Président butter that I had to get from the fancy grocery store is
the "extreme" outlier here. It has 110 milligrams of sodium in it, and even that isn't that
big of a difference. We're talking about a pretty confined range. So you could add or
subtract that salt from the salt called for in your recipe by using math, or not.
If it isn't abundantly clear at this point, I generally avoid doing math at nearly all
costs. Luckily you just don't need that much math here in the home kitchen. You need it
in the professional kitchen when your goal is standardization. When you're a professional
chef who is managing a team of cooks, and your trying to make sure that they're gonna
generate the same exact plate of food for dozens of customers, night after night after
night. That is not our goal here.
Math, weights, precision ingredients — what they allow you to do is perfectly execute
someone else's recipe. But that is that what you're going for? I don't think so. I think
what you're going for is to make something that you like, and only YOU know how much
salt you like. Salt perception and preference is incredibly variable from person to person,
so the better way to season when you're cooking for yourself is just to taste your food. Put
in as much butter as you want — salted or not, who cares — and then give it a taste,
and if it needs more salt, put more in. And if it doesn't, don't.
Granted, some things are harder to taste while they're still in progress, like baked goods.
You can't just taste the raw cake or cookie batter. You have to rely on the recipe to
tell you how much salt to dissolve in there before you bake it. Or do you? The recipe
doesn't know how much salt I like, and I taste raw batters for seasoning all the time.
I mean, look, there is some risk of food-born illness from that, and you certainly shouldn't
do it if you're immunosuppressed. But yeah, I taste raw batters all the time. If you're
just a little clever about it, it's amazing how many foods you can taste for seasoning
before you've lost the opportunity to evenly distribute salt throughout — that's assuming
that you want to evenly distribute salt throughout. I love uneven seasoning! People's exhibit
A, the pretzel!
In a perfect world, yeah, I think we'd all cook with unsalted butter. Elaine cooks with
unsalted butter. But this is not a perfect world, and I think you can make most recipes
work with whatever kind of butter you've got. Don't be believe me? Some guy in his kitchen
with a camera? I don't blame you, so take it from Julia Child. She wrote in her 1961
classic "Mastering the Art of French Cooking":
"Except for cake frostings and certain desserts for which we have specified unsalted butter,
American salted and French butter are interchangeable in cooking."
Julia says so. So if you've got a problem with me on this one, you've got a problem
with Julia. And let me tell you, if you've got a problem with Julia, you've got a problem
with me.
When I write recipes, I often specify salted butter in the ingredient list. But that's
not because you can only make it with salted butter. I just want you to know that I used
salted butter when I made that for myself. So if you're gonna use unsalted butter, you
might wanna use like half a pinch more salt than I did, not that you should be relying
on my recipe for that anyway, because only you know how much salt you like. Taste your
food.
When I write recipes, I tend to assume that you're using salted butter for two reasons:
#1, salted butter is far more popular here in North American and in the U.K., which together
account for the overwhelming majority of my audience. Reason #2 is I figure if you're
an advanced enough cook to be using unsalted butter, then you don't really need to be following
my recipe to the letter anyway. You're probably cool enough that you can adjust things for
yourself. You don't need me — you already know how to cook. So if you're the kind of
person who really wants laboratory precision in your recipes, might I suggest that you
start your own cooking website. With Squarespace.
You go to Squarespace.com and just hit Get Started. You can do this part for free. Here's
all the templates — stuff for weddings, restaurants. Maybe try blogs and podcasts.
This one looks good for recipes. And then you go in and you basically just start replacing
their words with your words, and their pictures with your pictures.
Then when you're ready to publish your site, or maybe buy a custom domain for it, you can
save 10 percent by going to Squarespace.com/ragusea. And at that point, Squarespace will provide
you with all the tools you need to host your website and keep it running, so that you can
then run me out of business with my culinary laxity. Using salted and unsalted butter like
they're interchangeable. Pshaw!
Legit, I'm just having fun here. I think there's plenty of room in this world for precise cooking
and just-kinda-feel-it-out cooking. There's room enough in the world for both. We're not
building a bridge here, we're just making our own dinners. Swallow the red pill or blue
pill — either one is fine!