Why Pastry Chefs Prefer High-Quality Butter

French cuisine is famous for the quality of its sauces, such as Beurre Blanc, Hollandaise, Bearnaise, Beurre Noisette and Beurre Monté. The common denominator in all these luxurious and delicious sauces is that they use butter as a key ingredient. And as French cuisine is one of the most delicate and refined culinary experiences in the world, it stands to reason that quality ingredients are essential. Butter is no exception from these high standards.

Why butter quality is important in sauces

Making a sauce in a professional kitchen is not just about getting the taste right, it is about elevating the sauce so that it makes a dish better and doing this consistently. This is why the quality of your ingredients is so important. Butter quality matters for the following reasons:

Emulsifying – This is a very common process in cooking and making sauces, and is more easily achieved using a high fat butter with a reduced water content. In sauces such as Hollandaise, for example, the extra fat content enables a tighter trapping of liquid droplets in the sauce, which makes the emulsion thicker and more velvety smooth. This sits better on a plate and has a more luxurious texture.

Controlled heat processes – The additional water content you get in standard butters results in the butter splattering, rapidly boiling off and adopting a burnt flavour when heated in a pan. If you use premium quality butters with more fat and less water, this process is smoother and more controlled. The butter will gently foam instead and won’t produce a bitter taste.

Complex tastes – The natural fermentation of premium butters adds to the complex flavour profile offered, and which can elevate a sauce to premium level. Good quality butters are naturally fermented, which means live bacterial cultures are added, rather than artificial additives. This natural process produces lactic acid, which is the tangy and rich taste you can only enjoy by using premium butters. It means that by using premium, cultured butters you can achieve statement flavour profiles with your sauce. Most premium butters are sourced from herds which enjoy a 100% grass-fed diet, and hence the butter has a higher concentration of essential vitamins. This also benefits the taste of the sauce, as well as the colour and the health characteristics.

The best butters to use for sauces

It is commonly agreed that French unsalted butter is the best type of premium butter to use for making a sauce. This has a higher fat content, usually a minimum of 82%, compared to standard butters, and the unsalted nature of the butter gives a chef complete control over flavour profiles in the sauce, meaning they can add their own salt.

Using French butter prevents a sauce becoming too thin and watery, and from splitting and coagulating, it also binds better with other liquids you might use in a sauce, such as wine or stock. These features combine to ensure a professional chef has total control over flavour and texture, and can achieve the very best results every time.