Delicious butters worth risking your waistline for.
After being demonised for a few years, butter has come slithering back.
Of course, you don’t want to be consuming kilos of the gold stuff every week, but treat it as a treat and you can enjoy every moment.
For me, a simple unsalted high-quality butter is mostly all I need. Cold and hard on soldiers for boiled eggs, melted over my allotment sweetcorn, the bedrock of my pastry, the yellow heart of my creamy mash.
But who can deny the delight of garlic butter packed into their baguette, or aromatically oozing out of a Chicken Kiev?
Bullion Butters is a new butter company working out of the rather prosaic location of West Byfleet.Most butter makers seem to be, or at least claim to be, based out in the heart of the country up to their welly tops in dung and bucolic beauty, but Bullion are less rural.
They started early 2020, just when the pandemic began and went straight into online sales only, so no need to repurpose sales plans as the crisis deepened.
All their butters are flavoured, so rather than end up with a fridge full of large packs of butters we tried their Luxury Tasting Collection – 6 Flavour Premium Gift Box.A rather smart mini-hamper arrived, packed out with straw and with six small jars of butter nestled like birds’ eggs inside.
Garlic and herb, mushroom and truffle, smokey paprika and then three sweet styles that I imagine were added for the Xmas market.
We tried the garlic and herb to make a small garlic bread baguette, the jars are quite small and we had just enough for a half baguette.
Beautifully buttery, but not all that garlicky, but then we do tend to overdo it here when making our own, but garlicky enough to give a hit, without overpowering the herbs.
A lot easier than making our own garlic butter as the butter is never soft enough for that without being’carefully warmed’ in the microwave. And we know how that usually ends, in a puddle of regret.
Next day we did in fact try a chicken Kiev; stuffing the pocket with mushroom and truffle, wrapping the breast in prosciutto, brushing with egg and coating generously in breadcrumbs whizzed up in the wonderful KitchenAid Cordless Chopper from chunks of our homemade sourdough.
A quick roast in the remarkable Ninja Foodi Health Grill & Air Fryer with Dehydrator and we had golden crispy Kiev.
A lot of the butter had escaped, but it had still done a good job on flavouring the meat and preventing it drying out, as chicken breast is wont to do.
Over the next few days we tried the smoked paprika butter to replace normal butter when cooking off cubes of butternut squash for a puff pastry ‘pizza’. This added a good extra layer of flavour and aroma to the squash that was verydistinct when on the plate
The sweet butters -mocha, cranberry and we tried on croissants and crumpets.I can’t say I’d buy the sweet butters again, nothing wrong with them and actually quite nice with the pastries, but I don’t have a sweet tooth. I like savoury stuff.
And I like Bullion butters.
Available online only of course, they have all kinds of offers on right now and butter freezes beautifully so get your orders in and get buttered up