Why Pastry Chefs Prefer High-Quality Butter

Pastry is a prominent feature of French cuisine and its taste is as much about the quality of the ingredients as it is about the design of a recipe or the skills of a pastry chef. Flour and sugar are obviously key ingredients here, but butter is the critical piece of the jigsaw, and the ingredient which brings everything together in terms of texture, stability and taste. For this reason, pastry chefs seek the best quality butter they can find.

At a professional level, chefs are looking at every tiny detail and they know that quality ingredients are what will elevate a dish or a product to another level. So high quality butter is an example of the premium standards a chef will go to when seeking to produce the rich taste, flaky texture and light body that characterises the best French pastries, such as croissants, Mille-Feuille, pain au chocolat or an éclair.

Artisan quality

High-quality butters typically contain a higher fat content of around 82-84%, compared to the 80% of standard butters. This allows the pastry chef to produce consistent, hand-crafted products with the same tastes and textures. When the butter melts it combines with the steam in the oven to develop delicate pockets of air in the pastry, this is what provides the resulting pastry with the perfect light texture. Furthermore, the higher fat content in the butter makes the dough more pliable and easier to work with, which also helps with lamination.

Intense taste

A higher fat content in a premium butter means a richer flavour profile, and one that has a more intense depth of taste. This provides a tanginess to the product which comes from the lactic acid produced when a dough is baked. A unique taste profile is also created by the culturing process, whereby live bacteria is added to the cream before churning. This is a natural process which adds complexity to the taste, rather than using additives as some standard butters do.

Texture

Higher fat butters enable the chef to improve the lamination process, to produce even layers with a reduced water content because the butter doesn’t melt too quickly. This provides enough water to create steam, which elevates the layers in the oven to produce the light, airy and crisp texture you want, and not the dense, heavy and soggy product that a lower fat content butter may produce. Because there is a lower water content in high quality butter, this means there is less shrinkage in the finished product. Pastry chefs prefer this because they know what the pastry will look like when it comes out of the oven. Another by-product of having less water content in a high-quality butter, is that it prevents the flour developing gluten. This results in the baked pastry being more tender, and developing a delicate crumb which melts in your mouth.

You can experience the very best French butters, with a higher fat content, from Douceur de France.