In the European Style

Not long ago, supermarket butter options were fairly pedestrian. The choices have since proliferated, and the quality is off the charts. Here, a guide to the revolution in good butter—an accessible luxury, even as tariffs loom.

BY ALEKSANDRA CRAPANZANO

Vermont dairy farmer Diane St.

Clair sent a Ziploc bag of hand-churned butter across the country to Thomas Keller at the French Laundry, his seminal restaurant in California’s Napa Valley. At the time, St. Clair was selling her flavorful, labor-intensive, European-style butter for $4 a pound at her local market under the Animal Farm Creamery label and was about to go belly-up. “Her lush, creamy, canary-yellow butter changed the way I viewed butter permanently,” Keller said. “It was truly the most extraordinary one I had ever tasted. I ordered every ounce she had in stock, and it has remained on my menu ever since.”

Animal Farm butter now retails for $60 a pound.

Fans of the TV series “The Bear” may recall the obsessive chef Carmy spending $11,268 to get it for his fledgling restaurant in season 3. But the fever for European- style butter is hardly limited to top-tier chefs. In the U.S. today, supermarket butter cases offer a giddy proliferation of options. Imports from France, Ireland, Denmark and Finland mingle with mass-produced domestic butters labeled “European- style,” and, often, local artisan butters. A butter boom has been building steadily for a couple of decades, with U.S. butter consumption jumping from 4.5 pounds per capita in 2003 to 6.5 pounds in 2023 (the most recent year for which U.S. Department of Agriculture data is available). As planned tariffs threaten to spike prices, now is a great time to consider what makes a quality butter worth buying and determine how to get the most out of the investment.

When St. Clair began making butter in the 1990s, most U.S. supermarkets sold mass-produced “sweet cream” butter. Significantly lower in butterfat than European butters, this smooth, neutral-tasting product was machine-churned from fresh cream. St. Clair sought something with more character. “I had to buy books from the late 1800s to learn how butter had

been made before it became a massproduced item,” she recalled. She also bought Jersey cows, which provide “the highest butterfat of all milking cows.” In 2022 she sold her dairy business to neighbors Hilary and Ben Haigh of Rolling Bale Farm, who still care for her Jersey herd and make Animal Farm butter just as St. Clair painstakingly instructed them to, consistently yielding a butterfat content of 87%.

That falls comfortably within the 82-90% butterfat required of EU makers, whereas the USDA dictates a meager minimum of 80%. Like European and other European-style butters, Animal Farm’s is made with cultured milk—a preservation technique that predates refrigeration and produces a delicious lactic-acid tang and a notably complex flavor.

The celebrated French buttermaker Jean-Yves Bordier has discovered that a little massage doesn’t hurt, either. In 1985, when Bordier bought a creamery in the town of Saint Malo, on Brittany’s coast, he found a butter-kneading machine akin to one his grandparents used and quickly realized that kneading butter yields a luxuriously dense consistency and a far richer flavor. Spread out in a kneader, the butter oxygenates, and its aromas blossom. Bordier likens this alchemy to letting a complex red wine breathe.

Today, Bordier’s is the butter that French-trained, U.S.-based chefs Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten seek out. Julie Sugliani, a senior manager at Maison Bordier, reports “spectacular” U.S. sales—especially given that the company doesn’t advertise. A 4.4-ounce bar currently goes for around $15.

An Affordable Luxury

Long “obsessed” by Bordier, American cheesemaker Marisa Mauro bought a 50-acre hilltop farm in Mad River Valley, Vt., in 2012 and began making handchurned, hand-kneaded cultured butter under the label Ploughgate Creamery. Today, it’s sold in shops from Vermont to Alaska. At the Manhattan restaurant Frenchette, it comes to the table in a broad, rustic slab, “on the cool side of room temperature, not quite soft,” said co-chef Riad Nasr. At sister establishment Frenchette Bakery, Ploughgate butter stars in the jambon beurre sandwich, and 4ounce bars are available for purchase at a price of $8.50—for now.

“The dairy industries both in the U.S. and abroad are very anxious as impending tariffs stress their already lean business models,” said Matthew Rubiner of Rubiner’s Cheesemongers in Great Barrington, Mass. He imports 11pound wooden vessels of Rodolphe Le Meunier butter from France, and slices it to order, currently charging $30 a pound. It’s the only butter he sells, but he’s monitoring the price of domestic products too.

“The closer you get to the Canadian border, the more complicated it becomes,” Rubiner explained. American butter-makers often source cream from Canadian dairies and cattle feed from Canadian producers. “What this means is, while the price of imported butter might well skyrocket, so could that of American-made butter.”

The happy news? A little of the good stuff goes a long way. Savor artisanal butter on a slice of bread, as you would a great cheese or tranche of foie gras. Mix imported and European-style supermarket butters with herbs to make compound butters that elevate everything from steaks to omelets. (See “Use Your Investment Wisely,” at right.) The best way to understand a good butter? Place a sliver on your tongue and let it melt. Don’t rush this small indulgence. Allow the flavor to develop and relish every nuance.