How to choose the right butter

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August 3, 2019

When the farmer has extra milk, he makes butter. And, who doesn’t love some real butter?

Mmmmm. Butter spread on sourdough bread. Butter melted over veggies. Steak with a flavored butter compote. Buttery cookies and pie crust. Butter in your coffee. I mean, it’s all amazingly delicious.

If you’ve shopped on our store, you may have been overwhelmed by the variety of butter options. You may have wondered - what’s the difference between regular, cultured, fresh, and spring butter? Let’s explore this a bit.

What do all of our butters have in common?

Our butter is real butter. It’s cream churned into butter. Voila! Nothing fake added - just maybe some Celtic sea salt.

It’s naturally yellow. Since our cows are 100% grass fed, the butter always has a yellow color. Butter gets its yellow color from the beta carotene in grass. FYI, many commercial store bought butters have added annatos or carotene to artificially fulfill customers’ expectations of yellow butter.

The farmer offers salted or unsalted options. Salt was traditionally added to butter as a natural preservative. With modern refrigeration, some people prefer salted butter for the flavor boost. Unsalted butter is also known as sweet butter. Unsalted butter is preferred in baking.

It’s frozen (with the exception of fresh butter). The farmer always freezes his butter just after it’s made. This is the best way for him to get you the highest quality product and keep it available.

Regular Butter

Our regular butter is made from milk in the summer, fall, or winter. It’s naturally sweet and comes frozen.

Cultured Butter

Cultured butter is made with sour cream instead of fresh cream. The cream is fermented with a starter culture. This technique was traditionally used to help preserve the butter for the longest time.

Cultured butter has a tart and tangy flavor. It can be used in any way you’d use a regular butter.

Fresh Butter

Fresh butter is made-to-order from fresh cream and is never frozen. The farmer offers this option only sometimes to those who either prefer to not eat frozen food or like to enjoy the complex flavors that each season offers.

Spring Butter

Amongst all butters, spring butter is the elite. It is the crème de la crème (pun intended).

Spring grasses are the most nutritionally complex, which makes spring butter have the highest nutritional value. Amongst all butters, spring butter has the highest levels of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, CLAs, trace minerals, and Vitamins A, D, E, and K.

Because spring grasses contain the highest level of beta carotene, spring butter has a wonderful yellow-orange color.

And, you may have guessed it. It also tastes phenomenal. The flavors are more concentrated.

Ghee

Ghee, or clarified butter, is made by heating butter until all water is evaporated and the proteins separate. The result is a product that has nearly 100% butterfat.

Ghee has a unique flavor and is fantastic for high temperature cooking.

Storing Butter

Butter can be stored for just about forever in the freezer, but we recommend a max of one year for the best quality. It will last 6-9 months in the fridge, and about 2 weeks at room temperature.

You can check out all of our butter options - including some great sales and bundle deals - here.

Enjoy the food!

Butter

Raw Dairy

Health and Nutrition

Cooking

Raw milk or fermented dairy and lactose intolerance. Why might it help?

I was misinformed. At some point, I read that raw milk contains lactase. As it turns out, this is not true! It is true that raw milk contains many live enzymes that are inactivated during pasteurization. But, what about lactase? I’ve heard many anecdotal stories from people who are lactose intolerant... but can handle raw milk or fermented dairy. If raw milk, yogurt, kefir, or cheese doesn’t contain lactase, then why is that?

Our bone broth tested negative-ish for heavy metals 🥳 NATURAL AND CLEAN

Over the past few months a bunch of people asked us if we tested our bone broth for toxic heavy metals. When we get the same question a lot, we of course look into it. My first question was --- Is there an issue with toxic metals in bone broth? As it turns out, yes, there "can" be an issue! Heavy metals are naturally present in our environment. We need the "good" heavy metals to thrive: iron, zinc, magnesium, copper, etc. But, we can 100% do without the toxic heavy metals: arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, etc. Too many toxic heavy metals can lead to a host of pretty awful issues: nervous system damage, cardiovascular issues, cancer, endocrine disruption, kidney damage, and so on. Our body is designed to excrete heavy metals through urine (and a little bit through sweat, hair, and breastmilk too)... but only so much. There's a limit. If you're overloaded, your body will store those heavy metals in your bones, blood, tissues, and organs. Similarly, if an animal is exposed to heavy metals via food, water, air, dust, or soil, those heavy metals accumulate in the bones. Maybe the farm's soil or air is contaminated from a nearby factory. Maybe the pipes for the water has lead solder connecting them. Maybe the feed a farm is buying was grown on contaminated soil or processed on contaminated equipment. And, of course, a main purpose of bone broth is drawing out as much as possible from the bones. If there are heavy metals in bones, they will make their way into the broth. This is especially true when you pre-soak with apple cider vinegar and simmer for 48 hours to make it thick and gelatinous (like our broth). And that led me to my second question --- Should I be concerned about every bone broth? Where is the fear coming from? Well... it seems it might be a little political. There was a study done in the UK in 2013 that scared a lot of people. It's titled "The Risk of Lead Contamination in Bone Broth Diets". This study found high levels of lead in organic chicken bone broth, which is quite concerning. And, in fact, this one study is still cited in articles written today! Let's dig a little deeper. Let's go farther than the short abstract. Here are the broths tested in the study and their test results for lead: (9.5 parts per billion): Broth made from tap water plus skin and cartilage(7.01 parts per billion): Broth made from tap water plus bones(2.3 parts per billion): Broth made from tap water plus meat(0.89 parts per billion): Tap water alone cooked for the same amount of time as a control. But, they only used organic chicken from one farm. And, there's zero information about that farm, their practices, the feed, and the broth recipe. Did they use vinegar or wine in the broth? Was the chicken's water contaminated with lead? What was the quality of the feed and the soil? Were the chickens raised indoors or outdoors? So many unanswered questions! All we get is that it was one "organic chicken" that created a lead issue with broth. Another curious thing is that the broth with skin and cartilage contained more lead than the broth made with just bones. Bones are where lead is stored, so why wouldn't the broth made with bones only contain more lead? It's an odd result. Moreover, the abstract of the study specifically called out "bone broth diets" like GAPS and paleo. They even go so far as to write, "In view of the dangers of lead consumption to the human body, we recommend that doctors and nutritionists take the risk of lead contamination into consideration when advising patients about bone broth diets." That's quite curious. Why are they worried about these diets? Are the researchers anti healing through food? Who funded the research? Is it political? My opinion? This study is not comprehensive. It does not speak to all bone broths. But it does cover a potential issue if the water or animals are overloaded with heavy metals. What I glean from this study is that we need more research. We don't need fear to spread and people to stop drinking broth from this one study. Regardless of whether the fear was fabricated or legit, we tested our bone broth anyway. After all, it's always nice to validate that your food choices are as clean as you think. For Miller's, here were my concerns before testing: What if there's mercury in the fishmeal in our chicken feed?What if the soil that our animals live on is contaminated?What is the well water that the broth is made with is contaminated?What if the Celtic sea salt has lots of heavy metals? We got the test results back. I was super excited. But, I was also confused. At face value, it appeared that our bone broth tested NEGATIVE for arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury. You can find the test results right here! You'll notice that, for every sample, the results are "<0.01 mg/kg" and "<0.02 mg/kg". I asked the lab what the "<" means. They said that it indicates their limit of quantitation (LOQ), the lowest concentration that can be accurately tested using the test procedure in that sample type. So the results simply report that none of the metals tested were found in the sample above the specific reporting LOQs. Whether or not they were present below this LOQ is information that is not provided by the test. When talking to the lab, I told them what we needed and assumed that this test would go below a 1 ppb. So, when the results came in, I assumed that a "mg/kg" was the same as a part per billion (ppb). Ummm... that math wasn't write! A "mg/kg" is actually a part per million (ppm). That means that the test we ran had results saying that the broth had less than 0.02 ppm (or 20 ppb) of arsenic and lead. And, it had less than 0.01 ppm (or 10 ppb) of cadmium and mercury. For some reference, the EPA says that less than 15 ppb of lead is safe in drinking water. Not saying that I agree, but it's a good reference point. These results are good. It means the broth definitely isn't overloaded with toxic heavy metals. But, it's not good enough!!! We need to test again! We really need to a lower LOQ. We need to know the results with an accuracy of as low as 1 ppb. It looks like the lab we sent the original samples to doesn't have an LOQ that low. So here I am on the hunt for a lab to do it again. As soon as I can, I'll send samples in again and paying for more expensive testing to get the info you deserve. Stay tuned! I hope to have the new results in by the end of April 2025. Do you worry about toxic metals (or other junk) in your food? Where have your fears stemmed from? I'd love to hear from you. You can comment below (no account required) or contact us 😊 ----- Sources The risk of lead contamination in bone broth dietsBone Broth and Lead Toxicity: Should You Be Concerned?Bone Broth and Lead Contamination: A Very Flawed Study in Medical HypothesesBone Broth, Collagen, and Toxic Metals: A Research Review

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How to choose the right butter

What do all of our butters have in common?

Regular Butter

Cultured Butter

Fresh Butter

Spring Butter

Ghee

Storing Butter

More from the blog

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Our bone broth tested negative-ish for heavy metals 🥳 NATURAL AND CLEAN

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Miller's Bio Farm, 523 Valley Road, Quarryville, PA 17566