2 posts tagged “butter”

I made the radio last night.  When I was in my car about 5 minutes from home, the DJ was talking about how she only had butter in her house because it was natural and she felt like it was better for her and her family than margarine.  Trans fats be damned, I'm going back to natural.  I sped home the rest of the way and wrote in - couldn't find the station number.  The DJ talked about my email on the air.  Nothing too exciting, but at least I got the message out.

This is such a hot button issue for me.  The whole natural thing.  If you look at any food on a molecular level EVERYTHING - from butter to margarine to sugar to aspartame - looks like a bunch of scary chemicals.  And it's very hard to tell them apart.  Now I'm not - and have never claimed to be - a nutritionist.  That's not my bag.  But, I can look at a food's molecular structure and get some sort of idea of its properties and how it will behave in the body.  In fact, hell, I won't use sucralose (or Splenda) because it's chlorinated sugar.  I don't believe that I need to be consuming chlorine on a regular basis.  That is a complete gut feel that is not backed up by any human study data - it just gives me the skeeves.

Long story short, I'm not going to judge anyone for making the food choices that they do.  You're putting it in your (and your family's) bodies, and that is one of our most basic human rights.  What I want to try to avoid is the general population being afraid of the food they eat or otherwise making unnecessary or incorrect choices based on some half truths.

So here we go.  A few years ago, the FDA had gathered some very conclusive data that trans fats are bad for you.  Walk down a busy street and ask anyone about trans fats, they'll tell you the same.  The world has gotten the message - hallelujah!  Except... it seems we can only remember a few food-related health facts in our brains at once.  So now, everyone has seemed to have de-throned Saturated Fat as the major evil-doer and has put Trans Fat in its place as Public Enemy #1.  As such, we as consumers have been making a MASS exodus from things that contain trans fat and have lovingly embraced Saturated Fat once more.  So for once and for all:

Saturated fat is STILL bad for you.  Or rather, trans fats and saturated fats are equally detrimental to your health.

Okay?  Choosing butter over margarine gains you nothing.  Both potentiate heart and other circulatory disease.  Both have the same amount of calories.  Oh and here's a kicker, butter has cholesterol and margarine doesn't!  Plus, nowadays a lot of margarine companies are reformulating to yield little to no trans fats in their finished product, making it much better than butter ever could be.  Well, healthwise anyway - butter is still yummy, from a culinary standpoint of course.  That's an entirely different issue.

The moral of the story is this:  Choose heart healthy oils - like corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, or olive oil - when cooking and all will be well as far as your heart is concerned.

Last night was a stellar class from one simple standpoint - I was walking out of the classroom at 10:00 pm.  On the button.  After a full day of work, going to class from 6 to 10 pm is quite an undertaking anyway.  Our classes were consistently running over to 10:30, sometimes 10:45.  That is - in a word - exhausting.

There were two in-class assignments yesterday, Béchamel and French Onion Soup.  Béchamel is a fancy name for "white sauce".  (Kinda like Espagnole is a fancy name for "brown sauce".)  It's the base for quite a lot of things, including macaroni and cheese.  [I seem to remember from back in 7th grade home ec that chipped beef on toast is based from white sauce too.]  It's also pretty darn easy.   You make a roux by melting butter in a saucepan.  Throw some minced onions into the butter and saute them, then throw in your flour and combine to make the roux.  Then, however much roux you've made (we made 4 oz), add about 10x that in milk (so, we added 40 oz milk).  Simmer.  Throw in a bay leaf and some cloves.  Simmer and occasionally skim the surface for about 30-45 minutes until you get a melted ice cream consistency.  Then strain the whole pot through cheese cloth.

We also made French Onion Soup.  Very like when I made the Vichyssoise, I was amazed at how easy soup is.  Throw some butter in a saucepan and get the pan screaming hot.  Throw in some sliced onions.  You need those puppies to brown, brown, brown, so don't toss the onions a lot.  Let them get up close and personal to the thin metal pan bottom separating them from the flame below.  Get them nice and carmelized, but not blackened.  Add an ounce of liquor.  Any liquor apparently.  We used a 50/50 blend of white wine and brandy.  For no other reason than we didn't have enough of either for the whole class.  Deglaze (aka use the liquor to dissolve and scrape up the stuff stuck to the bottom) the pan with the liquor.  Then add about a quart of white beef stock.  Simmer for 30 minutes or so, season with salt and pepper, and serve.  Easy squeezy. 

At this point, if someone asked me what the biggest difference was between how I used to cook and how we cook in class it would be this: the use of aromatics.  I don't make anything in class without cutting up an onion, shallot, or leek and sautéeing it in the fat that will be used in the recipe.  We use parsley stems, chives, bay leaves, thyme sprigs, and a multitude of other herbs.  At all times.  Any stock or base sauce has something aromatic simmered with it and strained out later.  There is no sauce that I've made to date that I haven't strained at some point.  And we use butter in lieu of pretty much any other fat.  Now this has obvious health complications.  You could use another heart healthy oil for these sauces (with perhaps the exception of olive oil because of its strong flavor) but it frankly won't taste as indulgent.  So aromatics and butter.  The difference in the flavor is nothing short of astounding.