Butter

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Butter is a culinary treasure as old as King Tut’s tomb. "She brought forth butter in a lordly dish" (Judges 5:25). A jug of wine, a loaf of bread – and butter! Pure butter is produced today essentially as it was in King Tut’s time, though with butter made of milk from cows instead of camels or water buffaloes. _______________________________________________________________

Varieties
Cultured Cream Butter
Made by adding lactic acid to butter. Before the advent of large-scale commercial butter production, farmers made butter from cream collected over several days of milking. During this time, the cream soured from the natural formation of lactic acid and make a pleasingly tart butter. Some people prefer its sharper taste.

Organic Butter
Produced from organic milk. By law, the cream used to produce it must be free of antibiotics, synthetic growth hormones and pesticides.

Whipped Butter
Standard butter pumped with air or nitrogen gas to create a light, fluffy texture. (Oxygen hastens rancidity). This is a good choice to serve at the table because it has a spreadable texture even when cold

European-Style Butter
Contains more milk fat than the standard 80 percent for American butters, and as a result, it has a creamier taste and a smoother texture. Because of its lower water content, this type of butter makes rich sauces, pastries and frostings, but you can use it in any application for which you would use regular butter.

Light Butter
With half the fat and calories of regular butter. It is made by combining butter with skim milk. It's fine as a spread, but its lower fat content renders a poor choice for baking or frying

Stick Butter
America's favorite and most widely available form of butter. It comes salted or unsalted; both are often termed "sweet cream butter."

How To
· Clarify Butter

Health Benefits
One tablespoon provides 355 IU of vitamin A (7% of your daily recommended intake), as well as small amounts of calcium, protein and vitamins D and E.

Nutritional Information: (1) Tablespoon; Calories 100; Fat 11g

History
The word butter comes from bou-tyron, which seems to mean "cowcheese" in Greek. Some scholars think, however, that the word was borrowed from the language of the northern and butterophagous Scythians, who herded cattle; which were Greeks who lived mostly from sheep and goats whose milk, which they consumed mainly as cheese, and was relatively low in butter (or butyric) fat.

Until the 19th century, the vast majority of butter was made by hand, on farms. Until the first butter factories appeared in the United States in the early 1860s, after the successful introduction of cheese factories a decade earlier. In the late 1870s, the centrifugal cream separator was introduced, marketed most successfully by Swedish engineer Carl Gustaf Patrik de Laval.