Better Believe It’s Butter

Gastropod

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Science, Food, History, Arts

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2017

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Butter is beautiful: solid golden bars add the perfect flakiness to pastry, give cake a delightfully tender springiness, and melt mouth-wateringly onto toast. But unlike its cousin, cheese—another concentrated, solidified form of milk—we don’t tend to think of butter as something that’s available in hundreds of varieties, each with a different flavor, color, and texture. Nor do we necessarily consider a dairymaid costume to be a uniform of women’s empowerment. But we should. This episode, we explore the science behind butter’s subtle variations, as well as its long history as a vehicle for both ritual worship and female entrepreneurship around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Lisa Ling, a journalist and host.
0:07.2	And I'm Hoon Lee, but you may know me as Chao on the Max original series War Year, based
0:11.7	on the writings of Bruce Lee.
0:13.4	After every new episode, join us here Hoon and I, and a series of special guests are
0:18.6	going to discuss how the show is made.
0:21.0	So, stream War Year season 3, starting June 29 only on Max.
0:25.5	And join us here, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:31.0	I was tasting, I think it was about 10 or 12 different butters.
0:35.6	And I was surprised by the nuances between the butters, you know, differences in taste
0:41.8	and texture and flavor, of course.
0:44.2	And I hadn't really expected that, given that butters essentially made from one ingredient
0:49.4	cream.
0:51.2	Have any of you noticed this that some butter, like butter you might get at a restaurant?
0:54.8	It tastes amazing, or am I just weird?
0:57.5	Cynthia, you know the answer to that one.
0:59.9	Yes, you are just weird.
1:02.7	But what's also weird is that, you know, I've done olive oil tastings, I've compared the
1:08.1	flavors of different olive oils I'm dipping my bread into, but it had never occurred to
1:13.7	me to do the same thing with butter.
1:16.0	Butter is just butter.
1:17.7	Luckily it did occur to Elaine Kusrava, she wrote an entire book on the subject.
1:22.4	Yes, there really is enough butter science and history and deliciousness to write a book
	...

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