Links - 20th April 2020 (2) (Butter in Canada)

In search of higher-fat butter - "Canada is a butter backwater, with less variety and quality and far higher prices than nearly any other food-loving nation. 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.In Canada, butter is just butter. Give or take a few very minor variations, it's a monopoly-produced dairy commodity, the same from coast to coast.And as Ms. 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. What's worse, Canada's government levies a 289.5-per-cent tariff on all but a tiny quantity of foreign butter... 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. 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).The law also stipulates that Canadian butter must have a minimum 80-per-cent fat content. As Mr. Nogler noted, however, it does not invoke an upper limit. At the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto about a year ago, Mr. 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. The stores were selling it for as much as eight times the price of Canadian butter, or the equivalent of $35 a pound.Mr. Nogler asked Chet Blair, Stirling's master butter maker, whether he could make a high-fat butter. As it happened, it isn't any harder. It's just that nobody had bothered to try.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. Fat content affects butter's flavour (more fat, more flavour), delivers creamier texture, and raises butter's melting point. But most critically, fat content is a zero-sum proposition: The more fat a butter contains, the less room there is for water. Higher fat butter can contain between 10- and 20-per-cent less water than the usual stuff.In chocolate making, that lower water content translates to confections that can stay fresh longer without the use of preservatives. In pastry, water acts like glue between dough layers, sticking them together when, ideally, they should separate (it's the difference between flaky and bready). It's not impossible to make an excellent croissant with Canadian butter – David Wilson, the head baker at Toronto's Oliver & Bonacini Restaurants, uses Lactantia brand butter. But Mr. Wilson is a rarity.Thomas Haas, a master pâtissier based in Vancouver, has found a simple, but not particularly satisfying solution. Like many European-trained bakers here, he uses 84-per-cent butter from New Zealand that manages somehow to squeeze through Canada's butter tariff blockade. "I feel guilty buying butter that's been shipped halfway around the world just because it has more fat," said Mr. Haas, who is considered one of the best pâtissiers on the continent. "But it's important."Jennifer McLagan, a chef and cookbook author (one of her books, called Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, rhapsodizes about the importance of good butter), goes to even greater lengths. She often allows Canadian butter to soften before using it. She then wraps the butter in cheesecloth and squeezes all the water out... Though Canada's butter prices are among the world's highest, that reality affects home cooks far more than professional bakers and food manufacturers. Under the Special Milk Class Permit Program, run by the Canadian Dairy Commission, approved bakers and processors receive hefty rebates on their butter purchases. One baker we spoke with said he gets a rebate of between $60 and $90 for every $200 block of butter he buys.The reason for the program, a Commission spokeswoman said, is that food manufacturers and bakers who export their products are allowed to import foreign butter without tariffs. Without the rebates, Canadian butter couldn't compete with the foreign stuff... Outside of its program for manufacturing exporters, the country allows in just 3,274 metric tonnes of foreign butter annually – less than 4 per cent of Canada's consumption. Anything beyond that is assessed a duty of 289.5 per cent."
From 2012

How the dairy industry complicates the quest for better butter - "Remember those 270 per cent dairy tariffs Donald Trump was complaining about? That's actually a bit low — foreign butter earns a whopping 298 per cent tariff when it enters this country... international trade politics take aim at our protection of dairy — the quotas that require farmers to only produce as much as Canadians will consume and the tariffs that keep foreign dairy, chicken and eggs out of the country... It is mandated to be at least 80 per cent fat, which seems plenty high, but is still two per cent lower than standard European butter. European butter also tends to be cultured, meaning active bacteria is added to it before churning, giving it a tangy taste... "If you're trying to promote the use of butter, why are you allowing us to import, why are you not pushing the industry to make better butter for us, promote your own farmers? I am French, but I am also Canadian, and I want to support what's local. But I want quality."... The conundrum of supply management is that outside the system, it makes no sense. Why should dairy, eggs and poultry enjoy the protection of quotas and tariffs when beef, grain and apples, for example, must survive in the thrust and parry of an open market? Especially when research shows that supply management forces consumers to pay higher prices. Inside the system, though, all this makes perfect sense. It ensures stable, consistent dairy supply that takes the whiplash out of being a primary producer of food, encourages family farming, avoids direct government subsidies and keeps food local. Kootstra thinks that it should be a model for all agriculture... Passionate farmers like Kootstra bring politicians over to the side of the dairy industry, especially since Canadian consumers have yet to rally around the idea of lower prices for dairy (and economists don't hold a big enough voting bloc)."

Chris Selley: Supply management be damned. Is Canada on the brink of a butter revolution? - "Art Hill, a food science professor at the University of Guelph, has some very simple shopping advice: “There’s probably no reason why you shouldn’t just go in and try to find the cheapest brand.” Not only are the products incredibly similar, he says, but many will actually be “coming out of the same churn.” The vast majority of farmers sell their milk into pools, where it’s combined with milk from other farms — and dairies that want to make butter will buy the milk they need from those pools. Unless you like paying for fancy branding, best save your money... our American friends, too, enjoy a more diverse domestic butter market — and vastly superior access to foreign products... Canada has its plucky butter upstarts, though, and Sylvain Charlebois, a business professor at Dalhousie University who studies food production, argues Ontario is leading the pack... Rob Gentile, the mastermind behind the Buca empire, recalls being astonished first and foremost by the bright-yellow colour — a hallmark of grass-fed milk and its byproducts... Gentile raves about what Emerald Grasslands brings to a kitchen, particularly when used to emulsify a pasta sauce... Paula Navarrete, chef at David Chang’s Momofuku Kōjin in Toronto, says it reminds her of the butter she grew up eating in her native Colombia. She serves it much more simply than Gentile: in a big slab on a flatbread with spiced honey, sumac and Maldon sea salt. She says customers come back just asking for bread and butter — “Drew’s butter,” as it’s identified on the menu.“Sometimes you forget that something so simple can be so amazing,” says Navarrete... Imports are still a tiny chunk of the Canadian dairy market, but they have steadily increased with each successive free trade agreement"

Canadian butter “really sucks”, says B.C. researcher - "“Canadian butter had the worst omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, it’s double what you see in French butter,” said Ghosh. “Our butter really sucks. There’s no other way to spin it.”Omega-6 content was highest in commercial butter samples from Canada, the United States and China, while samples from Russia, Belarus, France and Germany contained the least. Butter from grass-fed cows had the most balanced ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids.The finding may explain why health research on the benefits and hazards of animal and vegetable fats are so contradictory in different parts of the world and why government advice on what people should eat and avoid have different health outcomes in different countries... Studies on the health impacts of dairy conducted in Europe tend to show positive effects, while similar studies in North America show no effect or a negative effect... “In countries where cattle are fed oil seeds instead of just grass and silage we are seeing differences in the butter,”  she said. “In France, even commercially produced butter is very close in composition to grass-fed and that likely has to do with what they are feeding their animals.” Scientists have struggled for decades to explain why people in France, with a diet high in animal fats have a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease compared with Britain and the United States.“This result begins to explain the French paradox”"