Is everything really better with butter?
Paula Dean Is Right: Everything Is Better With Butter
While Paula Deen may be canceled, people will still say this famous line. What is it about butter that seems to hold things together?
Butter achieved a really bad reputation in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but it seems like nowadays people are finally coming around, realizing butter is actually not the enemy given it’s just fucking great. Whoever said it was over back then was probably just lonely and sad because butter has been having its moment and actually never left the finest of dining establishments.
Take France for example, because hello, fancy cuisine and class. Those refined AF foodies have the most decadent taste and have been swearing by butter forever. They know what they are doing in the kitchen.
French cuisine has an entire method dedicated to le beurre (thanks sixth grade French) where they plop a chunk of chilled butter into soups and sauces called monter au beurre which doesn’t, but should, translate to makes it better.
Let’s Talk Sauce
But more specifically, let’s talk about the sauce. Sauces are a masterful craft of elevating a meal that can be composed of tons of different ingredients, but adding a little butter goes a long way to get the job done. You would be surprised how well it thickens while balancing things like an acidic flavor profile. Take a (very) basic sauce of tomatoes, onions and garlic. Those simple ingredients combined are fucking fire, but by adding in butter suddenly that grounds the whole sauce and adds a velvety richness.
There are different ways to add butter to sauces, depending on what you’re going for. Usually, a white butter sauce that consists of hot butter mixed with a dash or two of vinegar is what you’d find complementing halibut or tilapia but if you sorta mess up the timing and cook the butter too long (or until it’s darker in color), what you really just created is a brown butter sauce that’s also great for vegetables like asparagus. You can also mix plain ol butter with cream, lemon juice, or add to meat stocks and make endless variations of sauces for every dish you heard of in that magazine you bought at the airport.
The same thing goes for the other end of the spectrum— sweet. Butter is by far superior to its vegetable oil counterparts like margarine. If you did a taste test between margarine baked goods and butter ones, the person you gave the margarine cookies to would probably not call you back but butter boy would be back in a few hours.
If you catch my drift, you’ll take it from the people who know what they’re doing in the kitchen when it comes to butter. Obviously, everything is better in moderation, but don’t make butter the demon it’s been made to be, he’s just trying his best.
