quick tip

This is just a quick list, brought up by something I learned when I snagged a pound of salted organic butter from the fridge by accident (rather than the unsalted one) while making dough for tartes tonight (#3):

1. Better control over salt content. Even with the nutrition label data, it’s hard to know exactly how much salt is in your butter – you could use butter to season your food, but that’s not really its job. Butter is my fat, not my salt.
2. Salt is a preservative. I don’t have solid evidence for this, but I would assume salted butter is older when purchased than its unsalted counterpart. Even so, I’d rather buy it in smaller quantities and know it’s good rather than have a mummified beurre-pharaoh in my fridge.
3. When making pie crusts or other similar doughs, salted butter melts faster and is MUCH harder to work with. There’s a reason it’s used on winter roads. This one is not so obvious, but very
4. It overwhelms the subtleties that great butters can possess. This isn’t always true (see my post on Kiel), but it is the case more often than not. Fresh creamed butter, especially unpasteurized, it absolutely fantastic and unrivaled in complex flavors. I swear I can taste the clover and other pasture feed in some butters.
5. I love fresh bread with butter – and this is the one case where salted butter might be better – but I generally go with anchovy paste for the salinity, or some other umami-laden saline vehicle.

Sorry salted butter: you’re…toast.