Le Meunier Beurre de Baratte Fleur de Sel "Salted"...$13.99 / 9oz
From the LA Times
"....But it was no mystery to anyone who has sampled the unbelievably tasty Beurre de Baratte — the French butter that is a featured ingredient on high-end menus at restaurants including Providence, Petit Trois and Republique. The guy in the white jacket at the center of the throng of chefs and food writers was Rodolphe Le Meunier, whose name is on every gold-foiled package. And in cheese circles, he’s a rock star. In a way, it’s funny that the thing he’s best known for in Southern California is his butter. At least until you taste it. Beurre de Baratte makes every other butter you taste seem insipid. It’s expensive, certainly (most restaurants serve it only with a surcharge). But as indulgences go, it's so good that it seems a relative bargain.
Le Meunier says the butter is made to his specifications in small lots by a producer in Normandy. The cream is inoculated with bacteria and fermented for a couple of hours — like yogurt. Then it's churned in an old-fashioned beater, orbaratte. Beurre de Baratte comes salted (aggressively, with fleur de sel) and sweet (unsalted). Both are a deep golden color and incredibly richly flavored, almost more like cheese than regular butter. The unsalted is best for cooking, but it needs to be used carefully because of its high moisture content (open a package and you'll probably see a little water weeping from the pat). Le Meunier says it’s great for baking cakes, not so much for crisp crusts. One of his favorite treats is to spread it on hot toast and sprinkle it with chocolate powder. If the thought of that doesn't get you salivating, you haven't tasted great butter. “And if you ever make beurre blanc with it and serve that on a nice piece of fish, oooooh,” he says, shaking his hand in the universal gesture for sublimity.
... the market, is well-stocked with the Beurre de Baratt for from the young cheese master Rodolphe Le Meunier, who is kind of the Jimmy Page of affineurs, a genuine Meilleur Ouvrier de France. (Beurre de Baratte is butter made the old-fashioned way; churned rather than extracted with a centrifuge.)
More to the point, perhaps, the pungent, deep-yellow Normandy butter has become a cult item in some of Los Angeles’ best restaurants. Early reviews of Walter Manzke’s restaurant République dwelled as much on the magnificence of the butter, for which he charged extra, as they did on his roast chicken or pork terrine. On recent visits to Petit Trois, it was unnecessary for the waiter to identify the soft butter that came with the baguette – the nutty, salty, umami-rich taste, like popcorn butter times 10, was unmistakable.
Info from articles in the LA Times - Rodolphe Le Meunier, a French butter rock star, visits L.A.
Object of Desire: Beurre de Baratte
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