Butter is better for you so eat more of it.

Food is not immune to Newspeak. In fact, it is pretty much certain if the narrative is that some food is bad for you then it’s actually good for you so eat it.

Butter gets a bad rap because the narrative says so. It’s one of the best fats you can eat. We’ll discuss why.

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Butter is the topic today. And that opens the doors to many other issues. Calories. Saturated fats. Low cholesterol, LDL. Heart disease. Diabetes. I’ll cover calories and saturated fats versus unsaturated fats and also cholesterol. The major diseases in the US caused, in part, by poor diet are for another show.

The first place to start is to know what butter is. Butter is the butterfat molecules from cow’s milk. Butterfat is agitated, churned or in some way acted upon to cause the butterfat molecules to stick together. As they grow into larger and larger bits of butterfat, the emulsion they are in breaks down and we see water and butterfat. If you have ever overwhipped heavy cream into butter, you’ve seen this happen. Butter making, that is, gathering all the butterfat molecules together to form butter is a one-way street. You can’t put it back how it was.

That yellowish blob is butter. It isn’t pure fat. Oddly, butter is about 75-80 percent butterfat with the balance being water and milk solids. Clarified butter is pure butterfat. In a commercial kitchen, butter and clarified butter are two distinct products. Whole butter is used for baking and pastry work. Whole butter does have a use on the hot line to finish sauces or make Beurre Blancs or browned butter, and to add to vegetables. Clarified butter is for making Hollandaise and sauteing meats and veg. The chief reason clarified butter is preferred for sauteing is there are no bits in it to brown like whole butter will. 

That’s a fast summary of what it is and how to use it. What about the eating of it?

We Americans have been beaten about the proverbial head and shoulders to avoid butter. Eat vegetable oil instead. I remember my mom buying Squeeze Parkay. What an invention. Already liquid “butter” that you can just point and squeeze where you want it. 

Part of the discussion between animal fats and seed oils is how they are produced. Butter is pretty easy to make and anyone can do it. Soybean oil or canola oil takes machinery, hexane, and special kinds of soaps to clean the oil, and then there’s purification. On the toxic free future website, they offer this about hexane. “Easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin, hexane has been recognized for more than 40 years to cause long-lasting and even permanent nerve damage in feet, legs, hands, and arms.” Seed oil producers insist, I can’t say they are wrong, that hexane is removed from the final product. Openaccesspub.com writes that “a trace amount of hexane may be found in the final product.” When you consider that seed oils may already be rancid in the container, there are more than a few reasons to avoid them.

If seed oils are so bad and the process can’t guarantee purity, why are they pushed so hard for Americans to eat?

That’s another show. Briefly, between lobbying efforts to push so-called vegetable oils and Ansel Keys popular, and flawed, research that animal fats are unhealthy, the US has been pushing the seed oils claiming them to be healthier than animal fats.

What is healthy? It sounds very important so we should be able to say very plainly what healthy means and what it is.

The answer to that depends on which political side of the food fence you’re on. Carnivores, Keto and Paleo folks are for animal fats. Vegetarians are a mixed lot who seem to tend toward seed oils. Vegans don’t eat animal fats. That is not, of course, an answer to what is healthy.

Healthy foods should improve the health of the person eating them. Sounds reasonable, right? It is, it seems to me, very reasonable. And now we really get to the messy part of the issue with a simple question. What is healthy?

I asked Google what healthy food means. It gave a website with an impressive answer. “Healthy food is food that gives you all the nutrients you need to stay healthy, feel well and have plenty of energy” comes off the Safefood.net page. That line was on the search results page. I clicked the link and the impressive went away. What I found was the standard narrative, and it is a narrative. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables and grains. Lean protein a couple of times a week and vegetable oils. Animal fats have cholesterol.

This was a simple question about one single ingredient. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. That’s attributed to Joseph Goebbels. It may as well be the marching orders for governments and their agencies.

What is it about butter that makes it better than margarine? That’s a question we can answer. To do so, we’ll start with a podcast from Nourishing Traditions, the podcast from the Weston A Price Foundation. Sally Fallon Morell is the guest and she’s also the founding president of the Weston A Price Foundation.

Sally explains that all animal fats were demonized. Butter got extra special treatment which included shaming housewives and moms who cooked with butter and not the new, modern shortening.

Butter advocates, like Sally, point out that before the invention and widespread use of Crisco, heart disease and obesity were almost non-existent. Since the move to processed fats and foods, the health and wellness of Americans have seen a pretty steady downturn up through the 80s.

Critics will point out that there were loads of changes in lifestyle from 1880 to 1980. That’s true. Another common and increasing thread was the production and consumption of processed foods. The more food manufacturers–think about that phrase, food manufacturer–innovated and invented “foods” that don’t exist in nature, the more Americans got fat and sick.

Butter is a natural food. Butterfat is a natural product of cows. It’s healthy and here’s why. Butterfat has butyric acid. Butter also is a source of Vitamins A, D, and K, which are fat-soluble vitamins. Fat-soluble vitamins are stored in the body’s fat and liver. There’s a very good chance you’ve never heard of vitamin K. It’s worth learning about. 

A bit more about fat-soluble vitamins from the Weston A Price website. “These fat-soluble vitamins are also necessary for hormone production, normal growth, neurological function, and protection against chronic disease such as cancer and heart disease.”

Butyric acid is a short-chain fatty acid that helps in the gut microbiome. We’ve covered the gut microbiome at least once, which isn’t enough. Butryic acid can also be made in the body when grains and high-fiber foods are fermented in the body which creates this acid. Butyric acid is energy for the cells in the colon and aids in digestion, improves the gut and intestines, and calms inflammation.

Butyric acid can be made in the body yet none of them creates more than the 4% of butyric acid found in butter.

One big issue used against animal fats is they are saturated fats. They are saturated with hydrogen atoms. This is a woefully crude illustration but I think it works. Imagine your shower curtain. At the top are spots for shower curtain hooks. When all the hooks are an eyelet, the shower curtain is saturated with curtain hooks. Remove one hook and it’s a mono-unsaturated shower curtain. Remove two or more and it’s a poly-unsaturated shower curtain. Turn your shower curtain into a long chain of carbon atoms and, if at every place a hydrogen atom can attach one is attached, that’s a saturated fat.

Okay, big deal. It’s saturated with hydrogen. That means it’s solid at room temperature. “Saturated fats play essential structural roles in the body, and specific saturated fatty acids have specific benefits to energy metabolism, immunity, intestinal health and metabolic health.” That’s from a page on the Weston A Price website. The text from this show is on the show notes page and this page will be linked there. The rabbit hole is vast. Like Watership Down vast. I encourage you to jump in. Not only for the saturated fats but also cholesterol and calories.

Cholesterol could maybe be half a dozen shows. It’s not going to be.

Cholesterol is a natural fat made by the human body. The body makes it because it needs it. Needs. As in it is vital. It is vital to the function of the brain and the nervous system. Cholesterol is a powerful antioxidant and cholesterol, particularly the so-called bad LDL, helps fight infections.

It’s almost as if they want you to lower your “bad” cholesterol to get sick so they can push a pill onto you. Nah. That can’t be.

There’s far too much about cholesterol to cover here. I’ll add this relevant piece about LDL since it is the thing often mentioned. It’s the bad one, remember, so best to reduce it. 

Nina Teicholz, the author of The Big Fat Lie and owner of the Nutrition Coalition website offers this about LDL cholesterol in reference to the USDA Dietary Guidelines. You know, MyPlate. “LDL-cholesterol is especially unreliable in trials involving saturated fats, since it has been known for years that LDL comes in different particle sizes and that saturated fats increase only the kind of LDL particle (large, and ‘buoyant’) that is associated with less cardiovascular risk.

There’s one last food issue with butter. Calories.

Calories are not, in my opinion, of particular concern on any given day. 2000 calories is pretty hard for me to do. What never seems to be discussed is the source of calories. A packet of sugar has 16 calories. If you eat 125 packets of sugar you hit your 2000 calorie limit. The probability is high that everyone agrees that’s a stupid way to get 2000 calories.

Any conversation about calories has to start with the source of those calories. One serving of butter is a tablespoon. That has 100 calories. Ingredients are pasteurized cream, lactic acid and it contains milk. Strawberry Banana Cheerios has 240 calories for 1 Cup portion with 3/4 of a cup of skim milk. The ingredients are whole-grain oats, sugar, corn syrup, banana puree, corn starch, strawberry puree, canola and/or sunflower oil and stuff I can’t pronounce. From a numbers standpoint, that’s a simple choice. From an ingredient standpoint, as long as you know what you’re reading, it’s also an easy choice. Seed oils cause harm. I don’t think there’s an upside for humans to consume seed oils. If you read the list correctly, it is sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, and sugar and seed oil and stuff. In the right light, calories alone isn’t a useful metric. Why is 2000 calories the magic line is a good question and another show.

We’ve gone a long way from the humble stick of butter. We’re almost done. The last point isn’t about the butter but the politics around butter and food in general.

I did an episode on the Great Food Transformation which involves the World Health Organization–think Bill Gates–the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and hundreds of corporate food sponsors all agreeing that animal sources of food are bad for the planet. EAT has partnered with Lancet, Oxford and Harvard to push the vegan agenda. If there is cash to be earned banning something or promoting something, you can be sure there’s a lobby for it and they are talking to Congress about it.

For the last 60 years or so there’s been a very effective fear campaign against meat and butter. It continues with renewed vigor and piles of cash for the campaigns. Push though they do, they can’t change the truth that meat and butter are healthy. That means they contribute to the health and wellness of the person eating it by providing energy, vitamins and minerals, and essential protein and fat.

The Escoffier Series: Chapter 13 Vegetables and Farinaceous Products

The Escoffier Series continues as we move into chapter 13.

Vegetables is a massive category. Escoffier makes no efforts to be complete simply because there’s always innovation that he could never account for.

We start the chapter with his list of vegetables (gnocchi and polenta and noodles is for later). Boiling, blanching he calls it, is the first cooking method. Is salted water really necessary? Is it important to keep the water boiling?

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The Escoffier Series continues with chapter 13, vegetables and farinaceous products. That’s rice and potatoes and gnocchi and polenta and noodles, which he calls macaroni.

Vegetables is a massive category and it would be impossible to account for them all. He does get to a few, however, and I’m going to read them to you.

Artichokes

Asparagus

Eggplant

Cardoons

Carrots

Celery

Cepes, or flap mushrooms

Mushrooms

Morels

Chanterelles

Chayote

Endive

Belgian Endive

Cabbage, white and green

Cabbage derivatives

Kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, turnip, Brussels Sprouts,

Cucumbers

Japanese Artichokes

Spinach

Fennel

Broad beans

Okras

Green beans and various dried beans

Lettuce

Corn

Chestnuts

Onions

Sorrel

Sweet Potatoes

Peas

Pimetoes

Potatoes

Rice

Salsify

Tomatoes

Jerusalem Artichokes

They are listed in alphabetical order by the French word, not the English.

I’ll wager you were surprised by at least two vegetables listed in the cooking part: cucumbers and lettuce.

You might have thought of one vegetable he didn’t include. You might have noticed mushrooms were segregated by Cepes or flap mushrooms, most of the rest and morels and chanterelles were identified particularly.

With all of that, there are some basics about vegetable cookery that are the beginning of the process.

Green vegetables should be cooked in enough salted boiling water so the water never stops boiling even when the veg is added. you might be thinking that’s a lot of water. It can be. Or it’s only a few pieces of veg at a time. The green vegetable should be refreshed or shocked if it is to be held for later use like in a restaurant. Shocked means lifting the veg out of the boiling water and placing it in ice water to stop the cooking. Shocking the veg ends the cooking process and preserves the nice green color.

As is so often the case, we’re in a conflict. If you are preparing a case of green beans for service, that’s a lot of green beans and that’s an hour or so boiling and shocking green beans. Blanching too many vegetables at once does risk color loss. It also risks nutrient loss. The longer the vegetable is in the water the more what’s in the vegetable, the green beans, moves out of the bean and into the water. That includes water and sodium, which is why the water should be well-salted before blanching vegetables. If the sodium level in the water is at least the same as in the vegetable, that’s an equal environment so the bean doesn’t surrender its own sodium to balance the water. That’s a lot of words to say salted water keeps the flavor in the bean or pea or asparagus.

Nutritionally, boiling vegetables depletes at least half of the available nutrients, particularly vitamin C in broccoli. There’s a whole rabbit hole about what various cooking methods do to vegetable nutrients. Escoffier might have had nutrition in mind, but his first focus seems to be appearance and flavor.

Escoffier uses the term blanching since he’s mostly talking to a restaurant cook audience. The goal of blanching is to partly or mostly cook the vegetable, green beans let’s say. During line service, this is handy since all that needs to happen is the green bean needs to be heated, seasoned, buttered, and plated. In the process of getting those things done, the beans will be cooked properly. Blanching is often thought of when skinning tomatoes or peeling pearl onions and when you can vegetables.

Escoffier has a section about cooking dried vegetables. I don’t know what the circumstances were in France when he wrote that. Nowadays, preppers may have dried vegetables on hand. I recently did some recipe development using dried vegetables and it’s different. One seemingly important tidbit was that Escoffier writes that dried vegetables of good quality and not more than 12 months old should not require soaking. Cook them in cold water on low heat bringing them slowly to a boil.

Braising vegetables is also mentioned. He offers a very particular procedure for braising which includes pork fat back and white stock. What is missing is any suggestion of a stewed vegetable. Stewed tomatoes, in fact. It’s not there.

I’ve made stewed tomatoes and a lovely stewed fennel dish that was an excellent accompaniment.

Braising would be done in an earthenware pot. Put thin fat back on the bottom, diced mirepoix in that, the veg to be braised which has been blanched, celery hearts for example, more fat back, and place it on low heat on the stove to loosen the fat and extract some of the vegetable juice. Add just enough white stock to barely cover the veg, affix a lid, and finish the veg in the oven.

I don’t think I’ve ever once done that cooking procedure. It sounds good. Parsnips is one of my all-time favorite vegetables and they would certainly benefit from low and slow cooking. Overgrown fennel bulbs and celery and woody carrots would also all be made better with this process.

Stewing, at least as I do it, starts with a fat, usually butter, then an aromatic, leeks or onions, the primary vegetable, flavoring of spices or herbs, and liquid, if it’s necessary. We made something called melted leeks which was leek rounds, washed of sand, and sweated in a decent amount of whole butter and salt and pepper. It takes about half an hour to make them wilt to look like they’ve melted and what you end up with is the sweetest pile of leeks you’ve ever had. They nearly disintegrate in your mouth and are an excellent accompaniment to a charred steak or something grilled and a touch bitter.

Home cooks have a different challenge. First of all, we are not, happily, cooking cases of green beans at a time. And while I’m here, let me add this confusing phrase.

Some restaurants use a green bean that’s pretty uniform in length and width. They look like thin pencils and are wonderfully green. They also have the very confusing name of Haricot Verts. Haricot means bean and vert is green. If you ask a Frenchman for haricot verts be prepared for a confounded expression. You may find such green beans packaged in small plastic clamshells for a rather tidy sum. They’re tasty, but I don’t value them for the price.

Our challenge is to get everything ready at mostly the same time so all the food is hot. To do that, there are ways to achieve flavor and appearance that don’t have entries in this book.

I never boil spinach. Ever. I always cook it on the stovetop in whole butter. Near the end, I’ll add a small amount of garlic and just before service, grate some nutmeg on top. Spinach tastes salty even when you don’t salt it. I salt it lightly because I know that flavor is a trick. Depending on what fats you have on hand and what the protein is, a complimentary fat is fine.

Asparagus can be grilled or roasted on medium-high heat. Fat asparagus should be peeled, in my opinion, since the peels start to develop a woody texture and the skin on thick asparagus stays stringy. Very hard to bite and not a pleasant dining room table experience. Plus, peeled asparagus has a wonderful light green color. I use extra virgin olive oil to coat the asparagus spears, salt and pepper them, then place them on a sheet pan and roast till done. They may need to be turned or rolled to get even browning on the asparagus.

If you are going to boil your asparagus, I recommend an extra step. Tie the asparagus with butcher twine near the end and near the tip. As many as you can hold in one hand is a good-sized package. Those two extra steps make getting the asparagus out of the hot water so much easier and also, then removing it from the ice water if that’s your plan. Why would you shock boiled asparagus after I just talked about home cooks not needing to do that? Cold asparagus with orange mayonnaise is an absolute delight. Cold asparagus and prosciutto ham or with salami is also dandy.

There’s a lot more to get to. This is a good start. There is a lot of repetition in the recipes. Potatoes may be an episode by itself since there is a lot that can happen with a potato. The starches will also be a separate episode. There’s too much to cover without getting dizzy.

I have no doubt I’ll mention this at least one more time in talking about vegetables. The French, especially in the 1980s, were all about al dente vegetables. That took on a very broad interpretation and each chef guarded his or her specific idea of what that was with passion. Those veg had crunch first, flavor second. The Italians are far more interested in flavor first and flavor comes from slightly overcooked vegetables. That’s not a hard and fast rule, of course. It’s simply an observation from eating a lot of food. I tend toward the overcooked vegetables since I also think they have more flavor.