Since before written history, humans have been mad about butter. (Er, sometimes literally angry.) In this classic episode, we explore the slippery physics, surprising strife, and salubrious nutrition of butter (and margarine, sorta).
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Hell though, and welcome to Sabor production of I Heart Radio. I'm Annie Reese and I'm larein Vocal Bam and today we have a classic episode for you about Butter. Yes, Butter, I like that word just sent you to a place. Annie, You're just like, yeah, I mean you and I have talked about how much we love the bitch, and we were on movie Crash and we talked about it. But now every time I think about I think of like the utmost just delicious, wonderful experience. And we were talking about we made a video with Banner Butter a couple of years ago, which you can still find on YouTube, and I just I have a big craving for their delicious, delicious butter right now. Oh yeah, I I was thinking earlier in Quarantine about ordering some and and then I just I just didn't. I don't know, like the whatever panic attack I was having that day moved on to some other focus. But um, but but yeah. Now I'm like, now I I do need I do need some of that butter in my life. Butter right, thank you, which is in Atlanta Butter by the way, local butter yeastening. It's like, what are you talking about any butter. It'sh delicious, so good. You can find them online. They're still going. Yeah, yeah, they ship, they ship certainly anywhere in the continental United States. Um and uh yeah, really great stuff, really great people too. Uh so. So the original episode or episodes, because this was a two parter originally, Um you butter believe it? Um, those those episodes came out in August of Um, and I was thinking about butter. Not that I'm ever like kind of not thinking about butter, but I was thinking about it specifically, Um after seeing this article from Food and Wine that was circulating the head and of which is butter is the bomb getting us through quarantine sales figures show, which is a great headline, Thank you, sing wine. Um. But but so they're they're evidence in the article is that Okay? So, Land A Lakes has reported that they're expecting their total butter sales to be up over and that is nut bar considering that restaurant demand has to be down and it's normally like one fifth of their sales. So wow, wow. I mean everybody's you know, making bread projects. I'll be honest with you, Lauren. Uh, I have at least three tubs of butter in my refrigerator right now. But it's one of those things right, just kind of like you know, going to the grocery store now is I don't want to forget anything. It's all sea butter and like twenty better, let's just get some so I understand. H yeah, No, it's uh, you can you can never have. I mean, it doesn't really go bad in the fridge, not for a very long time. So yeah, that's what I do, like like whenever I if, I if I'm going to make a trip out to um, like the Farmer's market or something like that, UM where I know that they carry like the good European cultured butter. Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, but yes so um So. We originally split this into two parts because I was pretty excited about splitting things into two parts back then. Um. Also, it was a very long like like like outlined, like a very long matter of information that we had. Um but we're just going to run them together. So yeah, I hope, I hope that's a good experience for y'all. I'm sure it is. And as one of my favorite things, we have to return one day and do Margarine, Oh, we do that whole fight between margarine and butter. It's pretty pretty epic. It does. Um. When I was looking for for updates to a couple of things I did, I just found even more articles about that. So so we should do margarine soon. But um, but in the meanwhile, UM, let's let former Annie and Lauren take it away. Hello, and welcome to food Stuff. I'm Anyree and I'm Lauren Volga Bum and today we are embarking on a two part podcast journey into the world of butter. Yes, I think this might actually be the longest outline to date, which is impressive because Champagne was very long and Honey, Honey Honey was super long as well. Yeah, but we have a lot to say about butter, as many people do. Yes, it's pretty nice. We visited a local butter creamery buttery buttery in Atlanta called Banner Butter, and we saw the making of some cultured butter and it was great. It was so cool, so cool. It's the noise of three pounds of butter hitting the sides of a of a churn is truly something to behold. It haunted my dreams. Oh yeah, it's quite upsetting. Yes, and there will be a video. Yes, it can haunt your dreams too, and you should let it because it's great. Yeah, that should be out actually this this very day that you're listening to this podcast episode, So look around try to find that. Yeah, you're good Internet people. Uh. And I'd like to say right at the beginning, we and a lot of sources we looked at use the fantastic book Butter, A Rich History by Elaine Kosova and researching this episode, So check that out if you're interested. So let's start, as we always do. What is butter. Butter is a concentration of the fatty and fat soluble parts of milk, which makes it sound so tasty, right, yeah, yeah, and it's solid form. Butter is actually a crystallization of those fats. Forget gemstones. I would like to pose it butter as the most beautiful crystals ever. I've never thought about butter as crystal. Well, that's pretty amazing. Yeah, it's a micro structure kind of thing. I'll get into that later. But okay, So in explaining what butter is, let's start with milk. Milk is mostly water, but about five to twelve of it is these little balloons or or globules of fat suspended throughout that water in an emulsion, an emulsion um. There are also water soluble and fat soluble things that are mixed in, of course, proteins and sugars and minerals, But today we are mostly concerned with the fat. Now. Cream is a greater concentration of those fat globules suspended in water, about fifteen and butter has how almost all of that water taken out. It's about eight fats. Side note here regarding all the wiggle room and all of those percentages. Milk, of course, is made in the mammary glands of mammals, and therefore it's composition varies based on what the animals eating and what kind of hormonal state it's in, which in turn is based on its age and the ambient temperature that it's hanging out in its birth cycle, and its stress level, lots of things. So your base milk and cream can vary, and on top of that, the process that you use to make butter can vary. Noted, thank you, But okay, So back to butter's physical composition butter physics. Yeah yeah, uh, Just filtering the water out of cream is not going to get you butter. You've got to agitate it. Now, you're not sending the cream like links to gross stuff on Reddit. You are. You are physically shaking it. Um. And this is necessary because in order to get the fats in cream to to clump up together, you've got to invert creams emulsion. And if that sounds scary, I guess it is for the cream. It does sound a little frightening. It's gonna be okay, all right. So cream cream is an emulsion which is an even mixture of fats and water, which do not usually like to mix because cream also contains these these protein chains called Casin's that are made up of both hydrophilic or water loving and lipophilic or fat loving particles. Okay, when when presented with both fats and water, Casin's grab bits of fat and cluster into globules called my cells, with the fat on the inside and the water loving bits on the outside. We've talked about this before. That's say this sounds familiar. Oh yeah, um. Now, these water loving particles grab onto electrons and the water, meaning that each my cell winds up having a negative charge, and since negatively charged particles repel each other, the globules spend themselves throughout the water in order to keep their distance emulsion. Now, one of the places you may remember this from is our yogurt episode. When you make yogurt, you're introducing an acid into the elan, which changes the charge of the my cells and allows them to clump together. But when you make butter, you agitate the emulsion so that my cells slam into each other, physically breaking up the bonds that are holding them together, and the fats that used to be cuddled safe inside are starting to freak out. The water is everywhere. They start thrashing out for safety, and first they'll cling to air bubbles that are getting into the next year and that's whipped cream. But if you keep shaking the mixture, breaking apart more my cells, eventually you expose enough fats that they can all clump together and push the water out. Be gone, foul beast. And this is called inverting the emulsion. I spent a lot of time trying to understand this to make an animation for the butter video. That's that's it. It's just it's just fats, you know, waiting until they have enough. Uh. I don't know what proletariat like like like enough enough fellow voters to to just kind of like say, screw you, We're going to be get out here in this globule. Yeah, get out of here. Water you don't need you. So, so what you're so, what you're left with here is a clumps of butter fat that are surrounded by butter milk a k A all that water and water soluble milk stuff. You then work or need the clumps together to press out more liquid, and then you have butter willa sort of. I mean, that's a that's sort of a long way to go to walla. That's more like a yeah, that's true. It's more like, well, there you go, step by step, here's the process there. Um okay, and remember how I said that butter is crystallized. Huh all right, the physics of this part are even crazier. But but okay, Basically that the wee particles of fats that start up wrapped up all cozy inside there my cells can be either liquid or crystalline in structure depending on their temperature. And that there's a wide range of freezing transformation points for fats. But but essentially butter fats start crystallizing around fifty degrees fahrenheit a k a ten degrees celsius. So in cream that's been cooled before the churning process, you've you've got a mix of both liquid and crystal fat particles, and those micro structures interact with each other, especially as the butter is churned and worked that the liquids stick to the crystals. And to get the consistency of your final butter just right, you know, like, yeah, neither neither melty and greasy nor stiff and flakey. You want to get your mix of liquid and crystal fats just right. And the exact way that you cool the cream is important, and the way you cool the butter after the churning is important. And there's been just a bunch of super in depth physics research into exactly how these butter micro structures work, which is so great, it's pretty fantastic and largely beyond me. So that's that basically covers the structure of butter, except except for the flavor. Okay. Traditionally, butter was a fermented product because lactic acid bacteria existed and refrigeration really didn't. So yes, lactic acid bacteria similar to the ones responsible for yogurut and cheeses and beer and sour dough would similarly act on cream either before it was churned or during the churning, meaning that the final product was cultured butter, which means that I get to talk about bacteria poop again. Okay, So these bacteria eat milk, sugars, and excrete acids, which work to both break up the globules and the cream and to flavor the butter. Most of what we consider butter flavor comes from these bacteria, and specifically they're poop thank you, bacteria. Poop thank you. And you can still buy cultured butter, uh these days. It's usually made from pasteurized cream and cultured by having some friendly bacteria added to the cream on purpose, rather than having let the cream sit out to collect wild bacteria. However, a lot of the butter that's sold in the United States is sweet cream butter with or without salt added, and this is a type of butter that's made from pastoraised cream that has not gone through a culturing process. Some is sold as is just like straight up the butter, but some is flavored as part of the manufacturing process to better match what consumers expect from butter. Yeah, the day that I learned this, I felt like I had been lied to my entire life. It was very sad to think of butter that has butter flavoring in it. It's just it's just depressing, it is. This is also reminding me of that line from The Witch the taste of butter. Yeah, oh yeah, anyway, another thing that might weird you out. Butter can also be colored during manufacturing because the yellow of butter comes from grass and cow's diets and the beta caroteen that grass can panes, which is released during the churning process, which is why butter is yellowish and uh not as yellowish milk is white. Yeah, but when cows are when cows are given less fresh grass, their butter will be whiter. So for consistency, some brands do color their butter. And speaking of lies that our grocery stores tell us. Okay. So, although any liquid that comes off of butter during the butter making process is technically butter milk, the term refers specifically too soured a k a cultured butter liquids, and because most United States butter is not cultured, generally, the butter milk sold in the United States is not a byproduct of the butter making process. It's just plain old milk that's been soured by adding lactic acid and maybe has thickener thrown in there to change the consistency. So it's like not even butter milk really, Nope, not at all. It's just called it. Yeah. And and you can't call right real buttermilk buttermilk. They call it way. What do they call it? But butter way? Yeah. If you if you don't have a very specific FDA approved process in place for for for testing the temperature and all kinds of other statistics about your about your product, you can't call something milk in the United States. Man, so some so, some, some small butteries will sell butter away. And I recommend picking that up and making mashed potatoes out of it, because it's the best. I made buttermilk biscuits with mine, and I actually filmed it and it went horribly wrong, and I may or may not post the video. It was so funny. I think the temperature, the humidity, something went wrong. It was so sticky and I couldn't do anything about it. And he's making this gesture like she's pulling strands of pasta like like, okay, essentially, now I'm really curious. Oh, I mean I'm thinking about it. I'm pond during it. Okay, I mean I don't want to open you up to to you know, internet humiliation. Yeah, well, thank you. You're a good friend. Yay, I try. Okay. So, so that's basically the science of what butter is. But obviously you don't need to know all of this in order to enjoy it, and people have been enjoying it four thousands upon thousands of years. Yes, and we'll get to the story of that after a quick break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back. Thank you, sponsor, Yes, thank you. So butter, like a lot of our favorite foods, was probably an accidental discovery. Historians think sometime around eight thousand BC and Central Asia, a herdsman went to take a swig of milk he had stored in his sheep skin bag, his trusty sheepskin bag, only to realize that thanks to all that slashing or churning around during travel, coupled with the bacteria and the sheepskin vessel, it had curdled into butter, albeit probably very different from what we have today. Yeah, and this is also the theory behind the creation of our old pal yogurt and our future VFF Cheese Cheese episodes Soon Can't Wait. In fact, one alternate theory suggests that way drained from the Kurds during the cheesemaking could have gotten agitated and resulted in the first butter. They could have been related. Their discoveries could have been related. Sure, it might have also had to do with temperature. Maybe in warmer climates, the the shake and milk became yogurt or cheese, and in colder climates it became butter. That's true. Yeah, However it happened, it most likely happened shortly after the domestication of Yak's goats and sheep, so no butter made with cow's milk in the early days, and word of the tasty discovery slowly spread throughout Asia and Africa. In ancient India, folks also realized that butter, once simmered, left behind an oil that could be stored for months at room temperature, which was such an amazing thing before refrigeration right traffic boon. Yes, and today we call this gee And it was one of the two main early ways of butter preservation that would emerge, the other being the European method much later of using salt yes, and the buttermilk wasn't wasted, either enjoyed as a drink, or used as the basis in cheesemaking. Italy and Grease weren't fans of butter, though they much preferred the plentiful and local olive oil are good. Buddy Pliny called butter a food for barbarians harsh words. They weren't above using it as a curative though uh typically as a ball for wounds, are for cosmetic purposes like making hair shiny or smoothing skin mm hmmm. And they weren't alone in using it medicinally or otherwise. Ancient Egyptians used it if you had something going on with your eyes. Yeah. And in India butter was used on the skin to ward off the cold and for burning in lamps. That would be a scent. That would be a scented lamp, a nice scent. Yeah. The word butter is thought to be derived from the Greek boo tiran, a roughly cow cheese. Yeah. But they possibly borrowed this from their cattle herding neighbors to the north, the Scythians, because They weren't cows in Greece at the time, so I don't know it would have been strange for them to come up with that call something cowcheese when they didn't have cows a little bit. The earliest recorded mention of making butter on purpose comes to us courtesy of a four thousand five year old Sumerian limestone tablet. Oh my goodness, m h. It's believed the first butter makers hung and jostle the milk filled animal skin from a horizontally suspended log. Yeah, and some cultures still make it this way, but by two thousand, five hundred BC, Sumeria milk was placed in terra cotta jugs and churned it with a plunger like tool. And we know this because there's a surviving fresco depicting it. I love that. I love that someone liked the butter process enough they were like, I'm gonna paint this. Yeah, this is what this is what I'm doing with my day. I'm going to dedicate some time to this. Well, we appreciate it in part due to the magical nature of butter, as in like it's sort of just happened, and they weren't really sure when it was going to happen. Various cultures used it in religious practices. Yeah, Sumerians offered it to a Nana, the goddess of fertility. In Hinduism, there are myths of how Gi was created in the very beginning of existence, as gods and demons turned an ocean of milk. Yeah, he was used to purify our annoint images of deities and Hindu worshippers with throg at statues of gods for good fortune. You might say, butter them up. Oh, and no, that was not just a terrible pun. Not possibly where the phrase comes from. No, possibly, possibly. The first written instance of that figurative meaning in English is from Very Interesting A few minutes later, A few minutes. Yes, the Messi used it as an ointment during lifecycle rituals, believing it to grant fertility and growth. In parts of Ethiopia is still tradition to spread red clay and butter on a future bride for several weeks. Foodist and Tibet made and still make, elaborate butter sculptures called tormas depicting the gods. And they're really cool looking, Yeah, I saidges looking them up. Ancient Druids would make butter to pay homage to the outs of fertility, something to do with the felic shape of the churn and the thrusting vision involved. I'll let you figure that out on your own. Celtic mother goddess and guardian of cows, awesome Bridget had an unending supply butter to feed people. Kelts also believed in something called butter luck, and they took steps to protect their dairy from being jeeks, like peeling some bark offen ash tree before sunrise mind you of course, oh my goodness, and wrapping it around the churn and milk pail. Or you could alternatively use a rusty nail from a coffin in your milk pail and that would do the trick. I'm glad there was a method, Oh there was very much so. Butter also pops up a few times in the Bible. The most sided example from Judges five, she brought fourth butter in a lordly dish. Abraham also makes a gift of butter, along with milk and a butchered calf to three angels who you know, drop on by what a nice gift. A lot of you probably heard all the Hubbub, possibly from one of our fellow podcasts about bog butter. But yeah and Ireland, it isn't uncommon to find large chunks of butter buried in wooden buckets dating back to four BC. That is still apparently hey okay to eat um yeah yeah. An Atlas Obscure article that interviewed someone who tried some of that bog butter he made so it wasn't that old um. He described the taste as similar to that of Parmesan cheese, but he also added that the chemical that gives parmesan its smell is the same one that's in vomit. M hmm. I did not know that. I'm not sure I needed to know that, but I do know it now, and so do you. There are a couple of series out there as to why people might have buried butter um. Maybe to keep some high calorie food around during the winter months in case food proved to be scarce suh. In some parts of ancient Ireland, Scotland and Northern Europe, it wasn't uncommon to be buried with barrels of butter because people loved it that much. Um or two peas in ancient God are fairies, so one of those things. You know, who can really tell why man berries is better. It's a question for the Ages. It's a very personal question. It is by a first century c. Butter was common basically everywhere, partially thanks to the movement of the Celts and then the Vikings, then the Normans. Yes, but it wasn't really that popular in China, where dairy generally never took off, or the Mediterranean, where the Romans used butter lovers as an insult. Yeah. In three records kept by Christian missionaries visiting Serbia mentioned kumis a fermented drink that had lumps of butter in it, And until the Middle Ages, butter in Anglo Saxon Europe was made with whatever sheep's milk was left over from cheesemaking. Cheese was more important than butter, so about two pounds for every one hundred pounds of cheese, And that meant that butter was expensive and largely enjoyed by the wealthy. That started to change when milk production and cow's milk butter became more of their own, separate entities. Yeah, butter featured in only two per cent of the recipes in this eighties Ish French recipe collection called Levandier, but by the fifteen forties it featured in a third of the recipes collected in another French recipe book called could You do It for Me? The full sit on. Oh you say, it's so much nicer than I didn't I try. Butter was banned during Lent, which was no big deal in olive oil preferring Southern Europe, but it was a real challenge in Northern Europe, and rather than resorting to olive oil or lard, some Northern Europeans would simply pay the Catholic search to get out of this butter band and in Ruin Normandy, France, that money may have been used to build the famous Butter Tower. This is this giant, gorgeous piece of architecture. Yes, it was much larger than I thought it was going to be when I Google image searched it. That it's really impressive. And if this is true, then people were eating a lot of butter in those days, and this cultural divide over butter versus olive oil was such a serious thing. There their stories about travelers from Southern Europe bringing all of oil with them because they thought that eating butter made one vulnerable to leprosy. Wow. And that religious aspect that the butter ban and the money that the church was was making from it may have actually helped drive the rise of Protestantism. The book History of Food points out that the northern European countries that turned Protestant had a history of dairy farming, so for them, the expensive import of olive oil for fast days when perfectly good butter was widely available would have been just particularly egregious. Martin Luther was super piste about it, and in fifty he wrote there's a few little sections taken out, but in essence, he wrote in Rome, they make a mockery fasting while forcing us to eat an oil they themselves would not use to grease their slippers. They then sell us the right to eat foods forbidden on fast days. Eating butter, they say, is a greater sin than to lie, blaspheme, or indulge in impurity. Miss strong words from Martin Luther. I know he was not messing around. And to be fair, if someone told me that I couldn't eat butter, yeah, and then sold me their inferior oil to use in place of it, yeah, I would be pissed about that too. I would as well. I believe this is the second time Martin Luther's shown up interesting all right well. Moving on into the Elizabethan era, sailors could expect one fourth pound of butter a day as part of their rations and newlyweds and often receive a pot of butter for prosperity and fertility. Marie Antoinette had a pleasure dairy where she and her ladies in waiting would dress as dairymaids and pretend to make butter wo yeah um. In seventeen six, butter played a key role in the first documented US student protest at a little university you might have heard of called Harvard. After a meal served with particularly rancid butter, Asa Dunbar, who would become the grandfather of Henry David, threw, jumped onto a chair and cried out, behold our butter stink is give us therefore, butter that stink is not. The rest of the student body joined in the protest, and this resulted in the aptlete named Butter Rebellion. Over half the student body was suspended, but this was overturned and the butter replaced the butter first documented US student protest. Until the sixteen hundreds, butter and other dairy products were made primarily by women. Had to do with lactation and birth and fertility. Yeah tho lady things. Yeah yeah, thanks to butter's high cost, this could mean social status for the women making it um. But then came the industrial evolution. The first creamery started popping up an upstate New York in the eighteen fifties and sixties, in tandem with the invention of the cream separator. Prior to the stairs were like fairly small, and butter producers used separating vats waiting days for the cream derived at the top. But the cream separator, which uses centrifugal forest to spend the cream up, took minutes. So from eight seventy, US butter production increased from twenty nine million pounds to over one billion pounds. And it it kind of forced. I didn't really force women out, but it wasn't women's kind of owned business anymore. Accomminated because it was hard for women to legally own stuff at that time. Yeah, that had something to do with it. Moving on from that, Congress came up with butter standards and definitions in eight six. In seven, the Nebraska Dairymen's Association printed a farewell to quote sound dairy Maid with her quote full rounded arms and sweet voice. Farewell, Yes no more dairy Maid. Beatrice Creamery Company marketed the first package butter in eight uh, and the current standards the US uses for butter were enacted in These regulations grade butter based on flavored color, saltiness, and texture, and butter sold in the US has to be at least butter fat. So that brings us mostly up to now. And that's also where we're going to stop this episode. So and the next one we're going to pick up with how it's currently made and the science and health and modern butter issues. Yeah, yeah, and uh and and today we're going to get into how it's made and some stuff about margarine and other things. But let's let's dive right into that how it's made part. Like we said at the top of the last show, we did get to visit a small creamery and that that one that one produces batches that are quite impressive about pounds of butter to a batch, but the industrial butter churns that happen are much much larger than that, but the basic process is still the same. Essentially, cream is separated from milk and pasteurized, then it's cooled. Then is the time for churning. Churns these days are these huge aluminum drums that are that are spun on the horizontal access by motors like a clothes dryer, Like a clothes dryer that fits thousands of gallons of stuff inside it. So they pipe in thousands of gal of cream and start spinning it, and there's a porthole usually on one end of the cylinder so that you can keep an eye on it. Within an hour, the fats come together and the liquids separate out. They drain off the butter milk because that's what those liquids are, and and rinse the butter with cold water. Then they start the butterfat spinning again to to work it further and to mix in salt if the batch is going to be salted. The butter clumps together in a huge mass at this point and is pulled out or spun out of the drum, weighed into batches and then molded and packaged for industry and consumer use. And these these batches that they're handling are like one thousand, five hundred to five thousand pounds of butter at a time, which is about six hundred and eight to two thousand two. I mean and like that that three eight pounds was quite sufficient for breaking my brain. So I kind of can't again. I'm like, oh, industry, it's big, It's huge. Yes. In addition to this type of machine, though, there are also more automated machines called continuous flotation churns, which look a little bit like, uh like like Willy Wonka's Everlasting gob Stopper machine, except instead of candy coming out at the end nozzle, you get a continuous ribbon of butter. Oh man, that sounds crazy in a in a very kind of beautiful disturbing way. Yeah, okay, well that's how it's made. Currently, let's talk about Marjarine briefly. We shall just briefly. So in eighteen sixty nine, Emperor Louis Napoleon the third held a competition offering a reward to anyone who could come up with a cheaper alternative to butter for the soldiers and the less rich than he. Yeah, it was just it was kind of a social welfare thing to feed the poor or the Navy, maybe mostly the Navy, probably mostly the Navy, but they tried to paint it in a way. Yeah, it's social welfare. It's lovely. Yeah. French chemist Epolite mage Marius answered the call with a beef tallospread he patented as oleo margarine. He took the name from a Greek word that means pearl like, but nobody seemed to appreciate it very much. Nope, and Morier sold the patent to a Dutch company called Unilever, which to this day is one of the largest producers of margarine. He never made a profit off of his invention, though, and died poor in eight Yeah. I wanted to say here that not all margarine is necessar fairly made of beef tallow that was that was his invention, But it can be made with any type of oil that's been transmogrified so that it's solid at room temperature, which most oils by definition are not. In these early days, margarine was made of animal fats that had been emulsified with water and skim milk, all of which is definitely cheaper than going to all the bother of making butter. Right, margarine reached the United States in the seventies, it really caught on, especially as a few years of bad weather in Europe made it very profitable to export butter or margarine that you're just selling is butter. Yeah. So, due in part to some bad press from this, the dairy industry stepped in and they lobbied hard against it, so hard, succeeding in getting the federal government to in state the Margarine Act in eighteen eighty six, which called for licensing fees and restrictive taxes on margarine. Some states didn't allow the sale of mar drain at all, and by nineteen or two thirty two states pass laws prohibiting margarine's use of yellow dye because they were using it to make it appear more like butter. Yeah, and New Hampshire, Vermont, and South Dakota required margarine to be dyed a very very unappetizing pink who. Yeah. The Supreme Court overturned these so called pink laws. Yeah, that's what they were called, but the yellow margarine band stayed in place. Margarine manufacturers later got around this by selling its product with two capsules of yellow dye that you think you manually like like as a consumer, would mix it in. Yeah, America's dairyland. Wisconsin was the last to get rid of this law in nineteen sixty seven, so not that long ago. And speaking of Wisconsin and nineteen fifty five, Wisconsin hosted a senator roal blindfolded it taste test between margarine and butter. Nothing can go wrong here, right, Well, all the senators got it right, except the loudly pro butter Gordon Rose Slip, whose wife had been illegally, illegally replacing his butter with yellow margarine due to her concerns about his heart. Man, imagine finding something like that out. I know, I don't think. I'm not sure if I could forgive that's. Yeah, I'm sure they had quite the discussion after this awkward Yeah, the stuff he missed in history class. By the way, has an entire episode about all of this called Butter v. Margarine and it's pretty excellent, so you should. You should check it out if you want more more details about all of that, Otherwise this would be an episode about margarine. We just wanted to give the butter related margarine facts. Yeah, yeah, just just a little nuggets, the pink walls, the margarine nuggets. Meanwhile, science was advancing, as it tends to do. Um chemists found a way to make plant based oils solid at room temperature, and plant based oils are are chemically a little bit different from animal oils, and that they're not as excited about doing that thing. They don't want to clump as much as animal oils do. Um. The process is called hydrogenation because it involves hydrogen, and it really is a great way to cut costs because plant based oils are even cheaper than animal fats. Plus you're preserving those oils because liquid oils go rancid relatively quickly. But margarine keeps pretty well. Yeah, thanks in part to scarcity during World War Two and the replacement of animal fats with vegeta oils, margarine past butter and popularity in the nineteen fifties and by nineteen seventy, Americans consumed in average of ten pounds in margarine a year, And that probably also has something to do with what we talked about before. That was around the time when sugar or was like fat bad, stay away from butter, no fat ever, eat more sugar, yes, and margarine was perceived as the healthier alternative to butter at the time. More on that in a moment, Yes, because the pendulum has since swung the other way, with butter consumption surpassing margarine in the United States in two thousand fourteen. Took until it did. This is very recent, with an average of five point six pounds a year per person, and that's still way lower than the eighteen pound per person per year average of the early eighteen pounds per person. Just think about that for a minute. Of butter, Yeah, oh, of butter, yes, okay, Yeah, And a lot of this has to do with these shifting health concerns because people were so worried about fat, and now people are more worried about fake like what's in their food? Yeah? Yeah, why why is this thing man made? Okay? So, speaking of those health concerns, though, we're going to get to them right after we take a quick break for a word from our sponsor and we're back, Thank you, sponsor. So, as we discussed at length in our episode on sugar and health, and as we were just alluding to a moment ago, fats like butter are not the dietary demons that we once thought, or rather that we were led to believe by decades of willful propaganda from the sugar industry. Thanks sugar, But how does butter specifically shape up health wise? Let me tell you, please do The modern consensus dietary wise is that plant based fats are healthier than animal fats. That simple sentence actually contains a whole lot, though, so let's unpack it. In order to do that, we have to go back to some of the research we talked about in our episode about sugar in your Health. In the nineteen fifties, one Ansel Keys started working on a thing called the Seven Countries Study, which documented the huge cultural differences in rates of coronary heart disease. Why do people from some regions get more sick and die of heart disease more frequently? M He found that saturated fats were associated with greater risk of heart disease, but the total fat intake was not, And this study formed the It was really revolutionary, not entirely the best, but but it formed the basis for decades more research into how the fats we eat affect our well, our health, and rats health and monkeys health because a lot of the research is done on a bunch of different animals. But okay, in that Sugar episode, we talked about how some of the research was either fault you to begin with, due to researchers like Keys selecting their study populations a little too carefully um and or that the research was twisted by the sugar industry to vilify fat. But part of the reason why sugar marketers were able to twist the research was that the scientists weren't really looking into sugar versus fat. They were looking into types of fat versus other types of fat. And that key finding of Keys, if you'll pardon the pun, is that saturated fats are bad and other fats are okay. And that kind of subtlety is unfortunately very easy to twist when you're just trying to sell whatever isn't fat. And also unfortunately that the more research that went into fat, the more complicated it got. Surprised. Science gives us answers, but they're not usually simple ones. Come on, science, Oh, I know, right, get your get your stuff together. Geez. So, over the next few decades, researchers figured out that fats are moved around in our bodies by a few types of stuff called lipoproteins. High density lipoproteins called h DALs you may have heard of them. Take fats out of your cells and send them to your liver to get them out of your body. Low density lipoproteins called l d l's put fats into your cells, and everybody needs some l d l s, but having too many floating around was found to be associated with a greater risk of heart disease. Researchers also figured out that the types of fats you eat affects your balance of l d l s and HDLs. Stuff called unsaturated fats tend to lower your l d l's and raise your h d ls. That's great, that's the best. Less of the stuff that you don't want and more of the stuff that you do. Uh, and unsaturated fats are found in stuff like nuts and seeds and fish. Saturated fats, on the other hand, raise both l d l s and HDLs, and saturated fats is the category that butter is in, along with other mammal products pork, b dairy, and coconuts. Strangely, UH and the more research that people do, the more it seems like the raising of both l d l s and hdl simultaneously is kind of fine. Eating saturated fats doesn't necessarily increase your risk of heart disease. However, replacing some saturated fats in your diet with unsaturated fats does seem to lower your risk of heart disease, clear as mud, just like all human and health things. Sure, it's but but okay, So so the end the end result is that butter is fine. I mean, you know, don't overdo it because remember that it's a really high calorie food. But hey, what about margarine? What about it? The fats that margarine primarily contains are neither saturated nor unsaturated. There this whole third category called trans fats. I remember how I said that margarine is made of oil that's been trans agrified to be solid room temperature. Do the process of changing the chemical structure of fats changes the way that our bodies interact with those fats. Uh So, trans fats wind up raising your levels of quote unquote harmful l d ls and lowering your good HDLs. So that's terrible, just awful. That's the worst. I don't want that, you really don't. And it's really it's kind of offensive when you think about it, because you've turned relatively healthy, unsaturated plant based fats into something that's unhealthy, and research indicates that there's no safe level of trans fat consumption. Even small amounts increase your risk of heart disease, and trans fats also have been shown to contribute to insulin resistance, which increases your risk of diabetes. It's upsetting, so butters Nope and Margarine, I might not recommend eating Yeah, it's it's always sad when people are trying to make the healthy choice and it just ends up being unhealthier. But again, it's it's all complicated, so complicated, and there's so much about our bodies that we don't know yet and that we have only started scratching the surface into figuring out. It's it's we're complicated in there, and then all the bits are small. Yeah, and I think unique in a lot of cases. Yeah, like person to person, it's really hard to hard to um, it's hard to make a generic Yeah. Yeah, I see you getting sad, even all you out there in podcast land. I can see you too, she can. Oh no, that's that's not that's not less creepy. I was trying to turn this around to a happy place. A flavor science. Flavor science does sound fun. There are hundreds of flavor compounds at work in butter. But the primary ones are called diacetyl and asked to in like we said, a billion years go at the very first part of this butter stravaganza. UM. Those those two compounds are excreted by the lactic acid bacteria that go to work in cultured butters. They they eat lactose, milk, sugar and excrete alcohol and these flavor compounds. So if you want to produce a butter flavor artificially, you can either culture just a whole crap ton of bacteria or yeast and collect the relative compounds um. That's called natural butter flavoring on labels, or you can synthesize the molecules in a lab and that's that's what you see as artificial butter flavoring. Diastal isn't just a butter thing, by the way, It's also made during fermentation in some beers, and it's what gives Chardonnays a buttery flavor. Yes, and uh, popcorn that smell yeah yeah in microwave popcorn. Um. And you might have heard about microwave popcorn causing health problems. It's it's it's true that in some factory workers who breathe in like a whole lot of diacetyl say it on microwave popcorn factory, there is an increased risk of lung disease. But that's not to say that eating microwave popcorn will cause you problems, or that it's bad to breathe in the amount that you'd make from popping a bag in your in your microwave. Occasionally, you're gonna be okay. People who follow me in any kind of social media know that popcorn is one of my favorite things. So this is key information for me. You got you got so worried, you know, but look on my face was horsh it was I was like, oh no, I tried to make it better and then I failed. That's okay. And before we leave you today, we wanted to go through some some cooking tips and some just I don't know, extraneous butter cultural notes that we that we found in our in our journeys of the internets. So first, some butter cooking tips. Butter temperature is very important. Yes, yes, we talked about the importance of cold butter when making a pie crust in the Apple Pie episode. Yeah, and and the idea here is that you want to coat as many flower particles as possible with fat so that they won't absorb too much other liquid and thus get glutiny. But you also want those fat particles to be firm so that they stay chunky right until they melt in the oven. Um. That's because the water content of the butter will evaporate, creating these lovely stiff air pockets, and the fat content is absorbed by the flour kind of kind of moisturizing it um. Thus you get a tender yet flaky crust that sounds delicious. When you're creaming together butter and sugar, the butter should ideally be softened at room temperature, not melted. No, because because creaming is a whipping process that creates a structure out of the butter in the sugar with lots of air pockets throughout. When you then add into the mixture, the egg distributes itself into those pockets, which just stabilizes the dough. Yes, and if you do have to melt the butter, it's best to let it cool bit so it's not hot, especially if their eggs involved, because you don't want to scramble the eggs as soon as you put the butter in. That would be very sad. You want to pay attention to salted versus unsalted. I've made that mistake. Yeah, although if you do accidentally buy salted and you meant to buy unsalted, just don't add salted later on in the recipe. Yes, the milk solids in butter, I mean it burns more quickly than other fats. It starts to smoke at degrees fahrenheit about one seven degrees celsius. So if you're going to use it in salt hanging, it's better to add it towards the end in combination with something else, another oil, um, or else use clarified butter. Yeah, speaking of of those those milk solids, browned butter so good. Oh, it's so good in cookies and sauces and basically everything. Now, if you've never experienced this minor miracle, all you gotta do is melt butter over load of medium heat in a in a light colored potter skillet. That'll let you keep an eye on it better. Um, because you're you're going to continue cooking it gently until the water in the butter boils off and the milk solids separate out from the fat in these little flecks that are going to turn golden brown. And and yeah, so so you're watching for the golden brown turning of the flex. You don't want to burn it. And it gives butter this amazing, beautiful, rich nutty flavor. Yeah, and that the first time I made it, the recipe I was following it said you'll know when you smell the like caramel tastes, taste smell and I'm one of those people that I'm like, I won't there, won't be, won't anything like that, and there was Wow, Suddenly it's it's lovely. And by the way, if you if you want to if you need chilled butter for a recipe, but you want to brown the butter first, to just brown it and then chill it and then use it as directed. Wow, I've never done this before, but I intend to try. Uh. Also, okay, back to Wisconsin butter laws and thanks to Instagram user binary Pineapple for the tip off on this one. Also thanks for making an amazing user name um. They also mentioned that their mother in law has stories about her neighbors crossing state lines to Illinois to buy margarine to smuggle home. It was no joke, man, Yeah uh and and yeah no, so okay. So there was a law put in place in Wisconsin in nineteen three amidst all of that Margarine kerfuffle um that mandates that all butter sold within the state must be evaluated by a state appointed panel. The panel grades the butter based on thirty two quality points, and selling butter that has not been thus graded in Wisconsin can carry a fine of up to a thousand bucks and a jail term of up to six months. Back in February, Carry Gold, which is an Irish butter producer Delicious Product, had to stop exporting its butter to Wisconsin because of this law. In March, a local civil advocacy group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, got involved. They filed suit with the state government to get Carry Gold back on store shelves, claiming that the law was suppressing consumer choice. And then in April, an Amish dairy out of Ohio called Minerva filed a federal lawsuit after being told to either fly in state appointed graders or to stop selling their product in Wisconsin. Yeah, Amish, Ohio dairy called Minerva, Yeah, what's wrong with you? How dare you so? So? Yeah? So we're we're living in exciting legal butter times pose for for Wisconsin. And I'm kind of joking, but I'm kind of not. Yeah. This is the culmination of of almost a hundred years of butter battle. Butter battle. That sounds so excellent. Another fun cultural butter fact butter sculpture, buttered butter sculpture. Yeah. In eighteen seventy six, dreaming iolanthe kicked off the strange, uniquely American take on butter sculpture when it made waves at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Thousands of people forked over twenty five cents to see this butter sculpture preserved with constantly renewed buckets of ice. Yeah, and the New York Times wrote, the harmony of the face is exquisite. The ear is quite a marvel of delicate manipulation. It was big deal, and the artist Caroline shock Brooks went on tour after the success and eventually settled down in Washington, d C. Where she did portraits of presidents and other politicians portraits out of butter in butter. Yeah. Her work culminated in a massive portrait of a wealthy family called La Rosa. That took eight years what yah and was later sculpted more permanently out of marvel. But it's still a thing. With the invention of refrigeration, butter sculpting in chreast in popularity, it saw ups and downs. Its butter became scarce during things like the Great Depression in World War two, and in nineteenft seven Norma Duffy Lion started a tradition of sculpting a cow made out of butter each year for the Iowa State Fair until two thousand and six. She also did pop cultural and political figures like Elvis and Obama. She came out of retirement to do Obama. That's delightful. Yeah, it's very interesting, And of course if you want to, you can make your own butter at home. You can't though it's so much work that we're not entirely sure why you would. Uh. You don't even need a churn though. You can just shake a cup of heavy cream in a quart sized mason jar for like fifteen minutes um until the butter forms up, and then rinse it with cold water a couple of times and need it until all the air and water pockets are are gone and then it's butter. Yeah, if any of you try it, please let us know. It sounds like a good arm workout. I know I get tired after like making a cocktail and cocktail shaker thirty seconds in. Yeah, I don't know. I think that was enough. That's enough shaking. That's that's shaken. That about brings us to the end of Butter Butterganza. I never thought that I would be sick of reading about butter, but but at this very current moment, I kind of am It was a uh, it was quite a bit of stuff too need through. There's a pun there somewhere we didn't make. There were a lot of puns we could have made, and we didn't. So not not nearly enough. It's true, and that brings us to the end of this classic episode on butter. We hope that you enjoyed it, and we hope that you're finding if I mean, if you're finding baking projects that use butter and are having a good time. We would love to hear about it. Oh my gosh. Um uh. We we always love hearing from y'all. Um uh oh. I do have one update though to the story that I was talking about about Wisconsin and they're continued low key ridiculous butter laws. So so there was this, uh, this this lawsuit I was talking about, UM, brought about by Minerva Dairy, um from Ohio. This this buttery creamery from Ohio. Um and uh, and it was settled in favor of Wisconsin's butter laws. In February, the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals held up those butter laws. Minerva tried sending it all the way to the Supreme Court for a review, but the Supreme Court like respectfully declined to review the case. They were like, all that's been said has been said here. Oh, I'm sure there's always more to say about butter and margarine. That's pretty great. Um, it's a it's a serious business. I say that in jest, but it also legitimately is it is I mean, and these are you know, people's livelihoods in the same way or in a similar way to um to all the laws protecting the names of foods from certain regions and stuff it. You know, it's a little bit silly on the surface right up until you realize that this really is people's lives and livelihoods and and pride on the line, so absolutely absolutely um well, speaking of livelihoods and prime pride, Please, if if you're working on any projects with butter or without anything cool, we would love to hear from you, and our email is Hello at savor pod dot com. You can also find us on social media. We are on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at savor pod and we do hope to hear from you. Savor is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts to my heart Radio, you can visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our superproducers Dylan Fagan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening, and we have that lots more good things are coming your way