![]() ![]() But most critically, fat content is a zero-sum proposition: The more fat a butter contains, the less room there is for water. Fat content affects butter's flavour (more fat, more flavour), delivers creamier texture, and raises butter's melting point. Three or 4 extra per cent of fat content may sound like a trifling difference, but it's a massive one in the worlds of baking and chocolate making. It's just that nobody had bothered to try. Nogler asked Chet Blair, Stirling's master butter maker, whether he could make a high-fat butter. ![]() The stores were selling it for as much as eight times the price of Canadian butter, or the equivalent of $35 a pound. Nogler noticed that a few of the high-end cheese shops were selling 250-gram balls of imported European butter, some of it advertising 84 per cent fat. Lawrence Market in Toronto about a year ago, Mr. Nogler noted, however, it does not invoke an upper limit.Īt the St. The law also stipulates that Canadian butter must have a minimum 80-per-cent fat content. ![]() You can't do much about packaging (butter must be sold in a printed foil wrapper), or make tangy, naturally cultured butter from raw cream that's been allowed to gently ferment (no raw milk, please, we're Canadian). You can't produce a single-herd butter in any large quantity, for instance, because under Canada's supply-managed dairy monopoly system you have to use milk from the provincial pool. Many other options aren't allowed, however. Nogler commissioned new labels that put the words "barrel-churned" right on the front. Where nearly every other butter processor in Canada uses high-tech machines to turn out a continuous stream of butter, Stirling still churns theirs in stainless steel barrels, batch by batch. So he started looking for points of difference between his company and all the other manufacturers. With just 20 employees and $15-million in annual revenues, Stirling is a tiny creamery. "Meantime the butter guys are sitting on their hands." "Look at margarine: You can get omega 3 margarine, you can get sunflower margarine and olive oil margarine – this, that and the other thing – and it doesn't make any of it much better. before joining Stirling, remembers being astonished the first time he took a serious stroll through the butter aisle. Nogler, who worked in marketing at Kraft Canada, Inc. She planned to use it in a test batch of croissants, which would be ready by the end of the week. Nourian said the day after receiving the sample. ![]() A salted version is also available in a handful of independent grocers in Ontario. As of January, an unsalted version of the butter is available to bakers and food processors nationally. Nourian was a five-kilogram sample of his latest product: an 84-per-cent-fat, barrel-churned butter. Nogler is the head of marketing for Stirling Creamery Ltd., a mid-sized dairy in central Ontario. Until last week, when a salesman named Greg Nogler walked into her patisserie, Ms. What's worse, Canada's government levies a 289.5-per-cent tariff on all but a tiny quantity of foreign butter. Nouiran and scores of other top pâtissiers have realized, Canadian butter is uniformly made with a government-mandated 80-per-cent fat content, while most butter in Europe – the stuff that makes for great pastries – starts at 82 or 83 per cent. Give or take a few very minor variations, it's a monopoly-produced dairy commodity, the same from coast to coast.Īnd as Ms. In Europe and the United States, it's available in myriad permutations, from gently nutty regional butters, to fragrant, seasonal butters made with the summer milk of a single herd, to extra high-fat "dry" compositions used in baking. "But you know when you know you can do better?"Ĭanada is a butter backwater, with less variety and quality and far higher prices than nearly any other food-loving nation. "Right now the quality we make is really high, it is really good here for Toronto, and it is really good as well for France," she says. It took the baker, who now runs two Toronto patisseries called Nadège, months of trial and error to turn out pretty good, but not perfect, croissants. ![]()
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