Also: unsalted butter, salted butter, european butter, cultured butter, beurre noisette, brown butter
From your cookbook
Examples from your kitchen
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Repeated tonight with halibut instead.
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In pie crust, butter temperature is critical. Cold butter creates steam pockets that produce flakiness; warm butter incorporates into the dough and yields a tough, dense crumb. When laminating — folding butter into dough — keep everything cold throughout. Rest between folds and work quickly to prev…
Butter
Butter is an emulsion: roughly 80-82% milk fat, 15-18% water, and 1-2% milk solids. European and British butters typically sit at 82%; American at 80%. "Cultured" butter has had lactic bacteria added before churning, giving a tangier flavour.
Why it matters. The water content is why butter splatters when it hits a hot pan — it has to boil off before the fat can properly fry. The milk solids are what brown and eventually burn, giving browned butter (beurre noisette) its nutty aroma. The fat carries flavour.
How to use it. Cold butter for laminated pastry, room-temperature butter for creaming into sugar, melted butter for cakes where tenderness matters more than lift, and browned butter for anything that wants toasted-nut depth.
Examples
(awaiting examples from cooks)
2026-04-27 — In pie crust, butter temperature is critical. Cold butter creates steam pockets that produce flakiness; warm butter incorporates into the dough and yields a tough, dense crumb.
When laminating — folding butter into dough — keep everything cold throughout. Rest between folds and work quickly to prevent the butter from warming up.
2026-05-13 — Repeated tonight with halibut instead.