Don’t skip the bread and butter service, in some cases, it’s the highlight of the meal. After all, not only are chefs creating their own bread program, but many have added on superb, cultured butters to help highlight the food.
“If you have extraordinary bread, and extraordinary butter,” said the famed French chef Jacques Pépin in an NPR interview 15 years ago, “it’s hard to beat bread and butter.”
It’s a note-worthy statement given the chef has either made or eaten some of the best dishes in the world. So why do we take bread and butter for granted as a placeholder to snack on while sipping drinks and waiting for the main dish? Sometimes, we even skip it entirely now that charging for bread and butter service has become more normal.
“I do think that most people think bread and butter is just kind of a filler,” said Bistro Vendôme chef and co-owner Tim Kuklinski. “But over the course of a meal, there really shouldn’t be any filler. Every bite should be delicious. Why even do it if it’s not amazing?”
So take another look at the menu. As many Denver-area chefs like Kuklinski offer memorable, elevated bread service, it’s time to dig in.
What Is Cultured Butter
Nearly all butter is made from pasteurized cream, meaning it’s heated to kill off any bacteria. But pasteurization is an indiscriminate process that kills both the good bacteria along with the bad. Culturing cream is the process of adding some of that good bacteria, or active cultures, back to the mix before churning.
“If you are culturing butter, your flavors are going to be more complex, you’re going to notice a flavor in your mouth that’s more tangy, as opposed to flat,” says Shauna Lee Strecker, owner of the Bella La Crema butter shop in Longmont. “With pasteurization, you’re literally killing everything. You’re killing the whole product.”
The resulting product is more reminiscent of a soft cheese than a hard stick of butter. It has a higher fat and moisture content, giving it not only a better taste, but making it far easier to spread even if taking right out of the refrigerator.
Doing this culturing process takes more time, effort, and health department scrutiny than most restaurants have bandwidth for. So, like many other quality ingredients, chefs look to outsource cultured butter from the experts.
Finding Better Butter
Bella La Crema not only provides butter for such Longmont establishments as West Side Tavern and The Den on Eleventh, but also sells a pocket-sized portable butter container called “Butter Snob” for those who wish to bring their own cultured butter with them to restaurants.
Other establishments import cultured butter from France. But while European-style butter is nothing new in a restaurant setting, cultured butter has grown in popularity. We see it on high-end menus across the country, achieving almost cult status for an ingredient otherwise considered a simple condiment.
On tasting it for the first time, it’s clear why. Think of this style as the Prosciutto di Parma of butter. Once you eat it, you gain a new appreciation for what butter can be. The flavor, the texture, even the color is unlike any other butter you’ve likely come across. Words you rarely use, like luxurious, come to mind. You try to come up with better words to describe the sensation, but then just give up and reach for more butter.
“Sourcing an excellent butter that’s made using traditions that date back hundreds of years pairs well with our house-made bread service,” said Alberto Hernandez, executive pastry chef at Frasca Food & Wine, which features French cultured butter, as does its sister restaurant Sunday Vinyl in Denver. “Bread and butter can be seen as a basic thing. It is found at most restaurants and served in various styles and qualities. Even though it’s simple, it is also pure. You can’t fake an excellent bread and butter.”
LoHi’s Dimestore Delibar advertises a “fancy french butter” with its bread and butter plate. RiNo’s Beckon uses Isigny St. Mer. Over at Chez Maggy in the Thompson Denver hotel and Bistro Vendôme in Park Hill you’ll find one of the most well-known and widely used brands, Rodolphe Le Meunier Beurre de Baratte.
Frasca Hospitality Group also uses the company, thanks to its accessibility through most restaurant distributors and the founder’s reputation. In fact, Le Meunier holds the title of Best Cheesemonger in both France and the world, and in 2007, he won the Un Des Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, an award only given out every four years to the best craftsmen in the country.
Rodolphe Le Meunier Beurre de Baratte is particularly notable among cultured butters because it is made with cream from the milk of cows grass fed at specially selected farms throughout Normandy. It’s churned for hours in the traditional method, using a wooden butter churn, which is a far cry from the stainless steel machines used in industrial butter production. Once ready, the workers hand-mold each pat for distribution.
“As we all know, fat is flavor,” said Chez Maggy executive chef Ludo Lefebvre. “We use Beurre de Baratte at Chez Maggy because it has a high fat content, which adds a much better texture when eaten on its own with bread than a more commercially produced butter.”
The Cost of Cultured Butter
Of course, with butter this fancy, it doesn’t come cheap, which can come as a surprise for diners accustomed for decades to bread-and-butter service being free. Upgrading to “fancy french butter” at Bistro Vendome costs $5. It’s $9 at Chez Maggy, $12 at Sunday Vinyl, and $8 at Dimestore Delibar. But according to area chefs, diners have no problem buying in.
“An overwhelming majority, I’m talking 95-percent to 98-percent of people, opt for the Le Meunier butter,” said Bistro Vendôme’s Kuklinski. “So we just did away with free bread and butter service a couple of months ago since they were already buying it anyway.”
Taste, process, and cost aside, perhaps the most important thing to consider when you see something like cultured butter on a menu is what it says about the restaurant offering it as an option.
Bread and butter is simple. Most of us still take it for granted. So for a restaurant to go through the effort and expense to import what’s considered the world’s greatest butter, maybe they’re doing so for a reason worth considering further.
“We feel using a superior product for something as simple as the bread service shows the attention to detail that the restaurant as a whole wants to put forward,” added Lefebvre. “Not all people notice it, but all the more reason to pay attention to the butter the next time you’re dining out.”
