Butter has fuelled us for at least 10,000 years. Vikings paid taxes with churned cream, ancient Egyptians used the fat on mummies, and smen – a fermented butter that lasts for decades – is offered at Moroccan weddings.
But this dairy fat isn’t universally loved. The ancient Greeks and Japanese Buddhists coined insults for people who consumed butter – long before margarine helped whip up anti-butter sentiment.
People go, ‘well, butter is just fat’, which would totally be really good feedback if I was just sitting there eating a bowl of butter with a spoon. But no one eats butter that way.Dr Emma Beckett, food and nutrition scientist with FoodIQ Global and the University of New South Wales, and author of You Are More Than What You Eat.
Margarine has also had its detractors, as butter-maker Pierre Issa recalls from his childhood.
My grandfather worked in the margarine factory when he was younger and he used to always say to me: you do not want to touch that, you do not want to put that stuff anywhere near your mouth.Pepe Saya, who runs Pepe Saya butter
With butter and margarine going in and out of dietary fashion over the decades, it’s hard to make sense of what we should be consuming. Dr Emma Beckett helps guide us through the cycle of dietary trends and offers a healthy outlook on approaching swirls and pats of butter.
Credits
Should You Really Eat That? is created by Lee Tran Lam
Mixed by Max Gosford
Artwork: Grace Lee
Theme music: Sydney Sunset by Nooky
Transcript
This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal of the Eora nation. I'd like to pay my respects to elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country.
Anu Haran: Apart from flour, butter is probably the single most-used ingredient in the bakery.
Pierre Issa: The next day she tried it and she said, “oh, it's horrible. It's ghastly stuff.” She said to me, “ah, don't make butter, don't even think of going into making butter.”
Dr Emma Beckett: I wish I could explain why we oscillate between these things and go from these dietary extremes and go from ‘all fat is bad’ to ‘put butter in your coffee’ and that's going to make your coffee healthier for you. I love butter, do not love it in coffee.
Lee Tran Lam: Butter can come in smears, swirls, wedges and pats and for at least 10,000 years, we’ve used this fat to flavour our food. Vikings paid taxes with churned cream and Ancient Greeks used “butter eater” as an insult, many millennia before margarine helped whip up anti-butter sentiment. With butter boards and sculptures leaving a sunny glow on social media recently, should we re-embrace this dairy spread?
I’m Lee Tran Lam and you’re listening to Should You Really Eat That?
This show explores the cultural, social and nutritional confusion over the staples in our diet.
Should you embrace olive oil, native ingredients and chocolate? Or skip the butter, salt and soy? It can be bewildering keeping up with what’s quote unquote good for you and so many different beliefs shape what we consume – what’s fact and what’s fashion and whose perspective is being overlooked? Untangling all of this can be tricky, which is why I started this podcast!
Today’s episode is on butter.
From Indian makhan to Egyptian samna baladi, butter fuels our days – sometimes long after it’s been churned. Michelin-starred chef Kevin Thornton has consumed Irish bog butter that's 4000 years old. Elaine Khosrova, author of Butter: A Rich History, says ancient Egyptians used the fat to help improve the appearance of mummies.
Washing yourself with rancid butter was another historic use of the fat, and maybe unsurprisingly, this rich condiment wasn’t universally loved. Japanese Buddhists called Westerners “butter stinkers”, and in recent decades, this dairy spread has gone in and out of dietary fashion. What’s undeniable though is that butter plays a vital role in pastry-making today.
Anu Haran: Hey, this is Anu Haran. I am the owner and also a baker at Flour Shop in Sydney.
My mum used to live in the south of India. That's where she was working. And my father used to live in Sri Lanka. So I used to travel as a six-year-old. They'd literally send me on a plane by myself. And I remember they used to serve, in the airlines, bread and with like, knobs, of butter – I had been trained not to eat that and so I would, like, bring that packet back to my mum as proof that I hadn't eaten it and she would sort of hold those butters up and probably make cookies or cakes of it at some point.
Lee Tran Lam: In a way, it was a sign of Anu’s future.
Anu Haran: Apart from flour, butter is probably the single most-used ingredient in the bakery.
Lee Tran Lam: Which she thinks is funny, because butter barely played a role in her upbringing.
Anu Haran: Butter in Indian food isn't really that fundamental. Like ghee is, because ghee has a longer shelf life. So in the Indian heat of the summer, you can have a pot of ghee lying on your kitchen counter, and it still wouldn't go bad. Whereas butter obviously because of the presence of milk solids and moisture in butter, it gets rancid a lot faster. So I grew up not eating very much butter at all.
I actually don't have any very fundamental butter memories. You know how when you go to restaurants, they give you bread and they give you butter? I'm the kind of person who more often than not will just eat the bread. I am not the kind of person who will smear a massive amount of butter on their bread.
Lee Tran Lam: Like Anu, I didn’t grow up consuming a lot of butter either. I spread the tiniest amount – no more than two knife-swipes – when I’m served butter with bread at a restaurant.
I once wrote an article investigating what happened to the mountains of butter left on people’s plates in restaurants.
It turns out that Anu and I are in the minority: many people completely and happily devour the mountains of butter they’re offered and in fact ask for several mountains more.
Anu Haran: It's one of the things I struggle to actually understand – you know, bread or hot cross bun with an amount of butter where you can literally see teethmarks on it.
Lee Tran Lam: It’s much harder to leave teethmarks in ghee – ghee is clarified butter and it’s a staple in Indian cuisine.
Anu Haran: A lot of it is either fried in ghee, or it's got a dollop of ghee on top of it, almost like the way you would put butter on a stack of pancakes, right? So it's a flavour enhancer, I guess, or a cooking agent, cooking medium. Like, say, Italians would use olive oil. Indians very often would use ghee. It's used as a fundamental sort of fat for cooking.
Lee Tran Lam: It also has cultural importance, too.
Anu Haran: But I know that in Indian weddings and so on, when the priest is kind of getting the couple married, very often ghee is something that's poured into the little fire. There's a whole bunch of things that get put into the fire. It's symbolic of the union and ghee is one of the main things that gets sort of poured into the fire as a fat to keep the fire going.
Lee Tran Lam: Ghee has spiritual significance in Indian culture – and around the world, there’s a religious element to avoiding or appreciating butter. Thousands of years ago, butter was left in Irish bogs as offerings to the gods.
The dairy spread was banned during Lent, but French worshippers who paid a spiritual tax were allowed to consume it – this financial loophole was so profitable that it helped the Catholic Church fund what’s known as the Butter Tower at Rouen Cathedral. It’s over 70 metres tall.
Now we tend to think of butter as a European staple, but India is actually the world’s greatest butter-producing country – it generates three times more butter than the European Union does.
Anu Haran: India is a massively dairy-eating country – a good portion of the population is vegetarian.
Well, this is where it gets a little bit funny, because I am Indian. And although I run a bakery where we produce things which may be inspired by, you know, Indian or Asian flavours. But fundamentally, the things we make are not Indian at all – croissants, the bread that we make, which is sourdough bread or focaccia, etc., are not Indian in the least.
Lee Tran Lam: Anu’s menu is flavoured with Indian influences, though: you might find samosa rolls and Masala potato Jerusalem bagels on the counter if you visit.
And though she avoided butter on her childhood plane rides, they’re a key part of her bakery’s ingredients list. She uses cultured butter, which has a unique tang like sourdough bread.
Anu Harah: For me, the neutral flavor of butter, the kind you get in supermarkets that's not cultured butter – to me, there's no appeal in that. Honestly, I'd rather eat cheese, right? Which is why at the bakery, I want the butter to be full-bodied and full-flavoured, which is why we make it a point for the most part, to be using cultured butter in the bakery, because that has the lactic acid sort of flavour – you want to taste the butter in a croissant. You don't want to be subtle about it. So everything – even the puff pastry, etc – we make at the bakery uses cultured butter, because it is nice and strong.
Lee Tran Lam: Culturing butter involves lactic acid – and one of the greatest uses of lactic acid in history probably comes from a French dairy worker called Adolfo Kaminsky. He realised the chemical could dissolve ink on official papers – this allowed him to forge documents that saved thousands of Jewish lives during World War II.
In other less life-threatening scenarios, butter can be useful as well.
Anu Haran: So there's two really important functions of butter: obviously flavour; and the second is the functional use of butter in baking.
Lee Tran Lam: Take the example of puff pastry.
Anu Haran: The role of butter there is essentially to guard the flour from overdevelopment of gluten. And when you then put it in the oven eventually, you know, as a sausage roll or a mushroom roll or whatever it is, it's the moisture in the butter that then evaporates and pushes against the flour particles. So in a way, the gluten strands trap the moisture or the steam that's coming out of the butter, which is what creates those thin layers and flakiness and the lightness in puff pastry.
Lee Tran Lam: Butter is also crucial in croissants.
Anu Haran: It's the moisture in the butter that evaporates in the oven, which pushes against the layers of the croissants, which then creates that honeycomb structure in a croissant. In a cookie or a cake, a lot of recipes begin with creaming your butter and sugar. And that's because you're incorporating air in that first stage.
Lee Tran Lam: A friend who worked in a bakery once tried to scare me with the claim that a croissant is 80 per cent butter. Is that actually true?
Anu Haran: Depending on the recipe or where you're eating it, it's anywhere between 30 to 33 per cent butter, which gets me to two points. One, you better be using a butter that is full flavored. There's no point really using a mellow-flavored butter. Well, one, because most of the customers who eat your croissants in a bakery are not eating it within 30 minutes of it coming out of the oven. More often than not, they're travelling somewhere, they're going to work, they're probably having it, you know, at best an hour after it comes out of the oven. And at worst, they’re maybe even eating it next day, which as a baker is not ideal, especially considering we're up at like one in the morning to make sure it's literally baked on the day, proofed on the day, baked on the day, etc. So you want people to have it at their prime.
My point is, if you're going to be consuming a product that is essentially a treat – you know, croissant is not essential for fundamental good health. Mental health, maybe, but not physical health necessarily. In my view, you may as well eat the best kind and you may as well eat something that's so full-bodied and full-flavored that you feel satiated after eating one.
Lee Tran Lam: While some bakeries might brag about using high-grade French or Belgian butter, Anu thinks it’s vital to use something that’s churned locally.
Anu Haran: I think as a food business operating in a community, I take a lot of pride in the fact that we source things as much as possible from either an Australian supplier or extremely local.
And when I say extremely local, like literally our neighbour's mushroom farm or our neighbour's citrus tree.
It's extremely tone deaf for people to be importing water, importing butter, importing things which are available. It's extremely, extremely tone deaf in this age of environmental screwed-up-ness for people to be doing that.
Why would I be importing butter from France or anywhere, when Australia has got a massive dairy industry and there's so many Australian suppliers now making good butter?
Lee Tran Lam: Also, the experience is great – even for someone who doesn’t eat that much butter.
Anu Haran: For me, the smell of the croissants coming out when you're using cultured butter, which we do, a local cultured butter, is pretty uncomparable.
Lee Tran Lam: And a little goes a long way.
Anu Haran: But a lot of things we do in the shop, we don't really hold back on flavour. Like I feel sometimes just the hint of chilli can actually bring out the other flavours. It almost acts like a seasoning. And same with butter.
Lee Tran Lam: So what does it look like?
Anu Haran: The butter we get is from a supplier who uses milk from grass-fed cows. So the butter also has like a very pleasingly yellow appearance. It's probably the presence of the carotenoids, if I'm not mistaken.
Lee Tran Lam: The colour of your spread isn’t always natural: butter can be altered by food dye. And in the US, laws were passed that required margarine to be coloured pink, so it couldn’t be mistaken as butter, according to the 99% Invisible podcast. In Quebec, Canada, a law requiring margarine to be a ghastly white-grey lasted until the early 2000s.
The Australian Food Timeline says Victorian legislation in 1936 insisted margarine be coloured like saffron.
Margarine was actually invented by the butter-loving French in 1869, as a portable and cheaper option that could fuel the military. While today margarine is marketed as plant-based butter, the original versions were not vegan-friendly: 19th-century French margarine was made from beef tallow and Australia’s first margarine, launched in 1892, included whale oil.
Lee Tran Lam: Speaking of local creations, let’s hear from someone who makes cultured butter here.
Pierre Issa: Hi, I'm Pierre Issa, butter maker of Pepe Saya cultured butter in Sydney, Australia.
My life has been a bit of half Australia, half Lebanon. For me, Australia's home. Earliest memory of butter would be my grandfather. He used to buy butter and he'd have it in the middle of the table. Summer, winter, it didn't matter. He'd have it in the middle of the table in a silver butter dish. He used to put on butter like cheese. It was so thick on his bread. Oh my God. Now, funny thing was my grandfather worked in the margarine factory when he was younger and he used to always say to me: you do not want to touch that, you do not want to put that stuff anywhere near your mouth.
Lee Tran Lam: Since its 19th-century invention, margarine has been made in many different ways – some way more unsavoury and unhealthier than others.
And the rivalry between butter and margarine has been fierce – with lawmakers often favouring butter and the dairy industry.
The Criminal podcast flagged that in Wisconsin in the United States, it’s still illegal to serve margarine in a public eating place instead of butter, unless a diner requests the alternative.
Wherever you stand on the butter vs margarine debate, it’s obvious that butter has been around for much longer. Sumerian depictions of butter-making, produced around 4500 years ago in what’s now known as Iraq, still exist today.
Pierre Issa: Butter was found when they would put the milk in the skins to transport it. Yeah, so butter existed ever since there was milk. There's the stories I've heard over the years of butter, like in Morocco, when there's a birth of a girl, they bury ghee underground and on her wedding day, they dig it out and they cook the meal for the wedding dinner.
Lee Tran Lam: This is a reference to Moroccan smen, a fermented butter that can last for decades and is saved for ceremonial purposes.
Before Pierre began his Pepe Saya butter business, he made a living selling desserts, such as panna cotta mousse and other sweets that required cream.
Pierre Issa: We accidentally ordered quite a lot of cream for Christmas and we didn't use it all. I had about 200 litres of cream left over. Well, we don't want to throw this out. We can’t do anything with it. So I started calling around to all our friends in food seeing who would take some and everyone was sort of closing down for the holiday season. So butter was the only thing that you can do with cream so you could keep it for a long period of time.
So we had a little mixer and I've still got the same mixer now, it’s a little tiny Hobart. And it took forever. It took us like five or six hours and we ended up from 200 litres of cream, we ended up with like 10 kilos of butter.
Lee Tran Lam: Even though it took forever, it was still more effective than the dog-powered butter churns of the 19th century: pooches running on treadmills were meant to agitate the cream into butter – but the concept never really took off.
After Pierre’s first butter-making attempt, he offered a sample to his partner Melissa Altman – they’d later launch Pepe Saya as a butter-making business together. But first, he had to convince her of his churning abilities.
Pierre Issa: Then I thought, oh, I'll take some home for Mel to try. She's a real butter snob. The next day she tried it and she said, “oh, it's horrible. It's ghastly stuff”, because it just didn't have any flavour. She said to me, “ah, don't make butter, don't even think of going into making butter”. And it really hit me, like the curiosity for me was, well, if you're you're just churning cream, why doesn't it have any flavour?
To make the Pepe Saya cultured butter, to formulate it and to learn, it took me six months to do that. While we were still making desserts, I was working most nights – like say we'd start at nine to make the desserts, I was coming in at about three, four in the morning just to work out formulas and how to make it and churn a batch and lucky for us, we were making an apple crumble at the time that needed butter. So I had somewhere to put the butter I was making.
Lee Tran Lam: It took nearly a year to develop something worth selling: their take on cultured local butter.
Pierre Issa: Still in 2010, when we would go to most restaurants, they would say, well, why would I take French butter off the menu and put your butter on the menu? Even though it was local and it tasted incredible and it was fresh, because their argument was, well, people come in and spend $150, $200 a head. I have to give them the best in class. And that's what was seen as the best in class.
And that's the biggest struggle that we had with in the restaurant scene – I remember lying on that couch at home and thinking, “oh my God, we're just going to have to close this thing down.”
Lee Tran Lam: Back in 2005, chef Ben Shewry couldn’t find any decent locally produced butter and simply churned it himself – his team spent a decade or so making their own cultured butter at his award-winning Attica restaurant in Melbourne.
Pepe Saya took a while to break through, but it’s now spread at restaurants across Australia and even served mid-air on Qantas planes. Pepe Saya is also produced in the US by Amish farmers with a 300-year-old butter-making tradition.
Pierre Issa: Right at the beginning, we used to churn about 200 kilos a week of butter – for the first two or three years would have been the maximum we would have done. And then now we're doing about 10 ton of cultured butter. And then we have so many other butters we do. So all up, we have about 40 ton of butter going through our creamery in Caringbah every week.
Lee Tran Lam: And here’s how Pepe Saya’s Nepalese Australian workers helped inspire the brand’s ghee.
Pierre Issa: We have a policy, we always have at Pepe Saya that the whole team can take whatever butter they want home. There's no limit.
I just kept seeing the Nepalese girls always taking like the two-kilo wheels of butter, like every week. And I'm thinking, I said to our manager, “geez, they must eat a lot of butter. They must cut it up and give it to their family.” And he said to me, “no, no, no, they make ghee out of it.”
And I'm like, “that's amazing – how do we make that?” And then we started experimenting and it was really the team that opened my eyes up to ghee.
And when you heat up butter, it separates and you have the milky liquid at the bottom and the fat on the top.
We're caramelising that milk, so that white milkiness becomes like a solid crumbly texture inside and once that happens, the ghee is ready.
Lee Tran Lam: The appetite for ghee goes behind India and Nepal. Niter kibbeh, for instance, is a spiced ghee that’s savoured in Ethiopia.
Clarified butter also flavours many staples in the Middle East.
Pierre Issa: I've always known ghee as a product and we've always used it in my family because of the Lebanese heritage. Once you cook your potatoes in this, it's sort of like, oh, I don't even need seasoning. Like, it's so rich and beautiful. The ghee is very close to my heart, so yeah, I love that.
Lee Tran Lam: On Lizzy Hoo’s Grand Gestures podcast for SBS, she talks to journalist Patrick Abboud about a recipe inherited from his Lebanese grandmother, where you pan-fry potatoes in ghee with eggs and spices and serve it with Lebanese bread and pickles.
Patrick Abboud: That's the first thing I remember cooking. And honestly, I reckon I cook that at least once every couple of weeks till today. Like I still cook it. My partner loves it. My son loves it. Like, yeah, the whole family loves it.
Lee Tran Lam: He jokes that it’s “basic bitch food”, but it sounds legitimately delicious.
Pierre Issa: Ghee is a magical product. Not only does it make food rich, it gives you so much energy. Like in Lebanon, they have fatteh, which is like cracked bread with chickpeas and yoghurt, and then they pour hot boiling ghee over the top of it, and they've been doing that for centuries.
So when you eat that, you don't eat anything else for the whole day. You just can't eat anything else, because it's so rich and so much energy out of it.
Lee Tran Lam: Butter and ghee taste amazing, but they’re also energy-dense cooking sources that contain a lot of saturated fats. Should we think twice about consuming them?
I'm Dr Emma Beckett. I'm a food and nutrition scientist with FoodIQ Global and the University of New South Wales, and I'm the author of You Are More Than What You Eat.
My earliest memories of butter are probably not until I went on a school excursion to Canberra in year three, because we were a margarine household growing up.
Mum was a margarine lady. Even though we spent a lot of time on our best friend's dairy – so we probably had access to good butter if we wanted it. But I distinctly remember a school excursion, Canberra, eating in a restaurant, and there were those little butter pats that you get with your bread roll. And I thought butter was amazing, because I'd only had margarine and I didn't know there were alternatives. So that's a fabulous memory that you've just stoked for me. Thank you.
Lee Tran Lam: So where is Dr Emma from?
Dr Emma Beckett: I grew up in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, a very regional rural area. We were just around the corner from lots of dairy farms. Our best friends’ families growing up were dairy farmers, so yeah, I spent a lot of time playing in the dairy and working in the dairy and hanging out with cows, but definitely only thought about milk coming from cows. Back then, I didn't think about all of the things that that milk could become – including wonderful butter.
Lee Tran Lam: I once consumed butter straight from a farm at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in upstate New York. The restaurant served single-udder butters from its cows Tulip & Jojo. Tulip, we were told, was twice as old but wiser. Near the meal’s end, a waiter revealed that the candle that had lit our table was actually made from clarified butter and flipped it over a plate to drizzle its warm flavours over a dish. It was delightful, like a magic trick.
And it was a contrast to the era I grew up in, when butter was reviled for its saturated fats and margarine was seen as a healthier option. It was the heyday of alternative spreads like I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.
Dr Emma Beckett: In the 1980s, it was a really big dietary focus to be low-fat, and fat was the demon and cutting fat out of the diet was the solution to all of the world's ills, or so we were told. And margarine, as a food science innovation, was really clever to use those vegetable oils to put a different kind of profile of fat in to substitute for butter.
It gives people different options, it serves different purposes, but there was this real reductionist approach where it was just ‘take this one thing and substitute it for another thing and everything's going to be fine’. And of course, that did not pan out. And then you know we flipped in the way the diet culture sold this to us and then we went low-carb instead – which is also sad for butter because it goes really well with carbs.
Lee Tran Lam: It feels like society’s recently switched from being anti-butter to suddenly hating on margarine. Is there any scientific basis for this?
Dr Emma Beckett: It was just this idea that cut fat, improve everything and butter was a real casualty of that. And of course, now we switch back the other way where there's people who want to demonise margarine based on the fact that it's ‘not natural like butter’ and it's ultra processed. And so, you know, neither of these things are absolute and true. Both of them can and will have their place in what people eat.
Lee Tran Lam: So how have we gone from shunning butter to hyping the act of sinking A LOT of butter into a coffee?
Dr Emma Beckett: I wish I could explain why we oscillate between these things and go from these dietary extremes and go from ‘all fat is bad’ to ‘put butter in your coffee’ and that's going to make your coffee healthier for you. I love butter, do not love it in coffee.
Lee Tran Lam: What we’re talking about here is Bulletproof Coffee, made famous by tech entrepreneur and so-called biohacker Dave Asprey. Inspired by Tibetan yak butter tea, he began spruiking coffee fattened with butter from Silicon Valley. Now drinking tea warmed with yak butter makes sense in high-altitude, cold mountainous Tibet, where this beverage is the country’s national drink – but it doesn’t really stack up as a smart health option when removed from its cultural context and given a tech-bro coffee remix. Nutritionist Kerry Torrens told BBC Good Food that bulletproof coffee is a high-fat drink that’s low in nutrients – a “poor alternative to a balanced breakfast”. She also said bulletproof coffee is something people with cholesterol problems should avoid, given its high content of saturated fats.
It’s weird how, as a culture, we’ve gone from ditching butter for margarine – only to swing back to tech-bros telling us how we should biohack our bods by dunking butter in our drinks.
Dr Emma Beckett: I wish I could explain that. But I think there's some deep human psychology in why we like to move between extremes and why we look for solutions in the extremes. Because moderation and, you know, ‘everything has its place’ is not very sexy – it’s not very salable.
That moving back and forth, sometimes it's based on changes in the evidence. We know that food nutrition science is not a static science. It's going to change as technology changes, as foods change, as people change, as society changes. So sometimes we learn new things and yes, we've learned new things about saturated fats over time. But I really think it's much more about cultural shifts and cultural beliefs than the science in that case.
We've been spending a very long time in nutrition going A plus B equals C, but we're not actually thinking about the complexity of those interactions. And so instead of thinking about ‘butter has fats, too much fat is bad, therefore any fat is bad, therefore butter is bad’, we need to be thinking about where do we use the butter? How much butter are we using?
What other foods are we eating with the butter and think about where it can be a healthy facilitator as well as a joyful food that people can enjoy eating rather than just using that spreadsheet approach.
Lee Tran Lam: Is that why some people believe replacing all carbs with fats – like butter – will optimise their health? And does that really work?
Dr Emma Beckett: I think that’s the basic logic that people are using. But also when people go on these very extreme diets where they cut out all the carbs, eating is just not as joyful anymore. And so you eat less. And you eat less because you're not enjoying eating as much. And that makes you feel in control. And that makes you feel like your diet is working. But it's really not nourishing your body and your soul in the same way when you're cutting those things out.
People go, ‘well, butter is just fat’, which would totally be really good feedback if I was just sitting there eating a bowl of butter with a spoon. But no one eats butter that way. So thinking about, not what's in butter, but what we're eating with the butter, I think is the really important thing when it comes to butter and health, because sure, if your major use of butter is to make pastries, maybe that's not the most nutritious or health-promoting choice. But if you're using butter to make vegetables taste good, then I say ‘hell yeah’ to butter, and that does make it a health food because it's facilitating healthy eating.
Lee Tran Lam: What about switching butter for an apparently healthier alternative, like olive oil?
Dr Emma Beckett: We humans love to compare things and rank things. I'll be like, I'm using butter in this recipe today. And people will be like, but isn't olive oil better for you? And I'm like, okay, cool. But olive oil is not going to play the same role in this recipe. Like I'm not going to make a croissant with olive oil.
Lee Tran Lam: She says you should use the fat that works in context.
Dr Emma Beckett: And when it comes to a healthy balanced diet, variety is the key. And that goes for your fats as well. So you know you don't need to be the defender of butter who uses butter in all things and only ever fries foods in butter. But you also don't need to be solely an olive-oil girlie who only makes recipes where olive oil would work. Like that would just be boring and it wouldn't be nutritious.
Lee Tran Lam: I remember interviewing Benjamin Lai, a software engineer who taught himself how to master croissants by making thousands of the pastries in his apartment – his home always smelt like butter. He’s since opened Home Croissanterie in Sydney, and he used all the thousands of test croissants as fuel for weight-lifting, training and cardio workouts. That sounds like a healthy-ish way of consuming croissants, right?
Dr Emma Beckett: I mean, have you ever made a croissant? It is so much work. Like the energy you burn making croissants is insane. But I mean if that works for him, cool. and you know, what else is he eating? He's probably not eating just croissants. You know there's beautiful things you could be adding to a croissant and ways that you could be making it more nutritious and different meals that can go with it.
If you're just eating croissants, sure, maybe that is going to be too much or maybe that is not enough nutritional diversity. But also we don't just make our nutrition decisions based off perfection for nutrition. Butter doesn't need to be perfect. I think butter is amazing, but it doesn't need to be perfect because we eat it with other things and it plays a role. You know, not looking at that kind of spreadsheet approach to ‘I ate my butter, therefore now I need to do an exercise’. The human body doesn't work like that. You don't need to torture your body to be allowed to eat butter.
Lee Tran Lam: Dr Emma says there’s a fun experiment you can try with kids: add cream to a jar, and shake the jar until it separates into buttermilk and butter. It’s a lesson she’s enjoyed teaching young students.
Dr Emma Beckett: Get them to put the butter on a cracker and taste it. And they go, oh, this doesn't taste like the butter we have at home. Then you add a little bit of salt to it. And suddenly it tastes like the butter that people are used to eating. And so then you get to start talking about how all these taste compounds interact and the texture of the butter. And then you can start adding the butter to other things. And that's when the students realise, ‘I don't like broccoli on its own, but if I put some butter on my broccoli, suddenly it tastes good.’ And then butter is not the enemy anymore. It's not the bad fats. It's the facilitator of eating the healthy broccoli.
Lee Tran Lam: It seems like a useful and nuanced way of viewing butter, rather than demonising it entirely.
Dr Emma Beckett: It's so funny because we look back at the era of ‘fat is evil’ and the era of ‘carbs is evil’ and we go, ‘oh gosh, that was so oversimplified. Can't believe we were that silly.’ You see these social media posts that say, you know, ‘margarine is one chemical structure away from being plastic or paint’ or whatever.
I mean, lots of things are one chemical structure away from being another thing because chemistry is complicated and amazing. You know, water is one chemical structure away from being an acid and we still know water is important. So, yeah, I think it's kind of wild that we've jumped from, you know, one extreme to the next extreme and it's like, there always needs to be a villain.
Yeah, margarine is useful for so many people in so many ways. And I use both butter and margarine and olive oil and avocado oil and vegetable oil and sunflower oil, peanut oil. Like they all have their places for different people at different times for different reasons. And so we can probably calm down about the comparisons and how things were created just that little bit.
Lee Tran Lam: Also, butter can be fun.
Dr Emma Beckett: So because we're talking about butter today, I have worn my little toast earrings because obviously, what's better than butter on toast? And I wore my milk shirt because that's what butter is made out of. But I definitely now am committing to getting some kind of butter outfit, whether it's butter earrings or a butter dress, it's on my to-do list. [Laughs]
Lee Tran Lam: Butter is also shapeshifting: there’s an American start-up called Savor that’s experimenting with making a plant-based alternative using carbon dioxide – it claims the method could be six times less carbon-intensive than producing unsalted butter.
And I’ve heard of vegan bakers using dairy-free alternatives such as shea butter to make croissants.
Because environmental or ethical reasons might influence the kind of pastries you choose.
Then there are headlines that could delay your next bakery visit – like “Daily croissant can take a toll on your heart in under a month,” reports The Times in London. An Oxford University study found that eating buttery foods for 24 days straight can “‘silently’ increase the risk of serious heart problems”.
The article also mentioned how “scientists have long been puzzled by the ‘French paradox’, of how a nation famed for its croissants — although they came from Austria — has relatively low levels of heart disease”.
Look, I’m not advocating that you consume intense amounts of butter-rich foods daily. But there’s no denying you can get a sizeable amount of joy by buying a treat from a bakery – it’s rare to get something so beautifully handmade for just a few dollars that you can take away in a butter-staining paper bag.
Anu’s Flour Shop business is only open for three days a week, but it has become a key part of people’s lives.
Anu Haran: Literally one person has been coming in for the last four and a half years or five years. He buys one strong cappuccino and one pain au chocolat every single day that the shop is open. And for him, that's a ritual and that's his breakfast. Yes, he's probably paying like a dollar more for a pain au chocolat than he would somewhere else. But he would rather eat a really good pain au chocolat with like the chocolate oozing out. And he comes at a time when he knows the pain au chocolat is going to come out of the ovens. I think a bakery becomes part of many people's rituals.
And It's so important. It's the one thing that kind of grounds your day. Like, if he doesn't show up one day, I'm like, what happened to Andrew? And in those moments of like midnight or your third day in a row when you're working at like 1am, you're like, why don't I just pick the easy option? And it's the human element of the whole thing, the customers who come back, the people whose lives you're a part of that make you stay true to what you are and what the bakery is. Andrew is as important to me as we are to him. It's these relationships that actually keeps me personally true to what the bakery is. So we have now become privileged enough to become a part of their lives. And do I really want to let them down? No, I don't.
Lee Tran Lam: Should You Really Eat That? is an SBS podcast. It’s written and presented by me, Lee Tran Lam. Thank you to the SBS Audio team, Max Gosford and Joel Supple for their contributions and guidance. A major shout-out also goes to Caroline Gates for helping launch the show. The brilliant artwork is by Grace Lee and the theme song is Sydney Sunset by Yuin artist Nooky. The email address for the show is audio@sbs.com.au.
On the next episode of Should You Really Eat That?, we’re reaching for olive oil to braise vegetables, treat earaches and drizzle over desserts. Follow on your favourite podcast app and if you liked this episode, why not share a review that covers your thoughts on croissants and all things butter.
