Salted vs unsalted butter

salted versus unsalted butter which butter is better to beat into your batter you better 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 butter that's where the analogy kind of breaks down but anyway you can save 10% off Squarespace by using my link encode in the description today's salted butter is vastly less salty than the butter that 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 to understand the surprisingly loaded social dynamics around salted versus unsalted butter it can also help you understand this humble home cooks 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 of butter 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 amounts 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 that's Elaine Custer OVA a classically trained pastry chef and what does he think she wrote the book on butter or what she did it's called butter or 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 Kostova 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 longboat sailed about ten times as much salt as we have right now they would not have been edible at all I mean eventually 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 ten times the salty is the salted butter we have now how much salt 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 90/14 thousand is 0.64 percent salt hmm if that sounds a little low to you you gotta remember that salt itself is only about 39% sodium I totally didn't make that mistake when I was researching this video salt is sodium chloride so we got to see if I remember basic algebra 0.39 of X equals 0.6 4 divide both sides by 0.3 9x equals 1.6 for this butter is 1.6 4% salt 10 times as salty as that would be 16.4% so here's a tablespoon of unsalted butter 14 grams 16.4% of that is 2 point 3 grams just to make the math a little easier on myself I'm a take away 2.3 grams of butter or there abouts 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 or if you're supplying your Longboat for a lengthy crews 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 custer OVA 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 stoke 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 young pretty extreme but then 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 okay let's make some of that one point six four times three equals four point nine percent 0.04 nine times 14 grams of butter equals 0.68% salt take that away from the butter replace it with salts and yeah that's pretty salty but hold on let me go get some bread I [Music] think that's pretty good and this is what table butter was until pretty recently and these dairy industry trade publications from about a hundred years ago people are talking about their butter being three or four percent salt that's two to three 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 they would 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 and 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 had 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 salt and butter cultured in this context is one of these funny words that kind of 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 ooh cheese fermentation is an alternative means of food preservation also tastes real yummy so yeah the French love that and at least here in the Anglophone world we have this long-standing cultural notion 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 dairy maid 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 its expensive and if something is expensive 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 Jacques Pepin and you know people like that who came along and introduced the American palate 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 homogeneous 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 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 a 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 a count 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 times 90 is 720 milligrams of salt in the 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 for tablespoon the Vermont Creamery has 80 milligrams and the carry gold from Ireland has a hundred mils the president butter that I had to get from the fancy grocery store is the extreme outlier here it has 110 milligrams of sodium in it but even that isn't that big of a difference we're talking about a pretty confined range here 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 you're 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 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 then give it a taste and if it needs more salt put more in if it doesn't don't granted some things are harder to taste while they're 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 foodborne illness from that and you certainly shouldn't do it if your 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 peoples exhibit a the pretzel in a perfect world yeah I think we all cook with unsalted butter Alain 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 got don't 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 quote 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 got a problem with Julia and let me tell you if you've got a problem with Julia you got a problem with me when I write recipe is 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 use salted butter when I made that for myself so if you're gonna use unsalted butter you might want to use like half a pinch more salt than I did not usually 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 one salted butter is far more popular here in North America and in the UK which together account for the overwhelming majority of my audience reason number two is I figure that 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 a laboratory precision in your recipes might I suggest that you start your own recipe 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% by going to Squarespace comm slash Ragusa 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 Plus Shaw legit I'm just having fun here I think there's plenty of room in this world for precise cooking and for just kind of feel it out as you go cooking room in the world for both we're not building a bridge here we're just making our own dinners swallow the red pill or the blue pill either one is fine

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,583,646

Rating: 4.9118996 out of 5

Keywords: salted butter, unsalted butter, cooking with butter, baking with butter, butter (ingredient), cooking with butter recipes, unsalted butter vs salted butter, kitchen tips, salted vs unsalted butter, salted butter recipe, unsalted butter recipe, unsalted butter benefits, unsalted butter brands, culinary history, culinary history of cooking, culinary history of the world, salted butter vs unsalted butter, butter (ingredients), homemade salted butter recipe, viking butter

Id: kP1BHrvYopI

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 23 2019

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