Shopping for butter? Wondering what makes "the best" natural butter?

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November 5, 2024

It's that time of year when I find myself buying NATURAL BUTTER BUNDLES to stock my freezer with.

Why? The large amounts of cookies and pies that fill my house with delicious flavors is impending and inevitable. And the absolute worst thing for a holiday baker is to go to make a yummy recipe and find that you're out of butter! I gotta stay stocked (and after all if I don't use it all now, it's good for a year in the freezer).

When it comes to butter and baking, quality matters. A lot. It affects the color, the texture, and the flavor of your baked goods.

And, if you're a natural food shopper like me, there are some extra things to look for in your butter. I want to make sure I'm making food with the best nutrition and least toxins possible.

What makes the best natural butter? There are a bunch of factors, and I'm happy to report that MILLER'S A2/A2 BUTTER checks all the boxes.

Here are the top 6 things to look for when shopping for natural butter:

✔️ High Butterfat. Commodity and supermarket butter typically has 80% butterfat. It helps keep the price down. But, our butter and European butters have a higher fat content, from 82-85% butterfat. It's all about getting a good churn and washing out all that buttermilk. Higher butterfat means softer, smoother, melt-in-your-mouth texture without feeling greasy.

✔️ Pasture Raised + 100% Grass Fed = Best Nutrition. Butter is a good source of lecithin and is rich in various vitamins, including A, D, E, B12, and K2. When the cows are raised in natural health, these health benefits are supercharged, which means more of all the good things! Our cows are pasture raised and 100% grass fed.

*Side Note: Spring butter is known for having max nutrition. We make it for 4 weeks of the year, when the cows are eating first growth of pasture in the spring. It's the most yellow and the most nutrient packed.

✔️ Yellow Color. A natural yellow color is a sign that the cows are fed grass, not bland and subsidized grains like corn and soy. The yellower the butter, the better the butter. The yellow color comes from the beta-carotene (which your body converts into Vitamin A) in plants, so this is a distinct trait of butter from grass fed cows. Some conventional butters have added colors like annatto extract to make the butter superficially yellow.

✔️ A2/A2. Although butter is low in protein, it does have some. If you want to avoid the potential opiate effects and longterm health damage caused by the A1 beta-casein protein, then A2/A2 is the way to go. I also like to think of A2/A2 as the most heritage dairy there is, since A2/A2 cows weren't affected by a genetic mutation.

✔️ Additive Free. Supermarket butters may have sodium chloride (AKA food grade salt), artificial colors, artificial flavors like diacetyl, or other unnecessary additives. Yuck! And this is all to keep the same consistency every time and perhaps cover up cheap, unnatural farming practices. Our butter is made simply with cream and only cream. If we add salt, it's Celtic sea salt. It's truly natural and will vary from batch to batch.

✔️ PFAS-Free. Trying to move away from plastic food packaging? Me too! Butter wrapped in paper sounds great, but it has to be coated in something so it doesn't spoil. Most butter papers are coated in plastic and can have all kinds of weird stuff on it -- including forever chemicals like PFAS -- which in turn can transfer to your precious butter. Our butter comes in 1lb blocks and is wrapped in paper that's tested to be PFAS-free, and freezer-safe!

Want to learn more? Keep scrolling for some butter-related recipes and blog posts to help you become a butter expert. After all, you deserve to have all the info you need, so you can be a smart natural food shopper.

What are you baking this holiday season? I'd love to hear if Miller's butter will elevate your recipes. Comment below or contact us!

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Food web vs food chain. I'll use the crazy egg recall as an example.

At Miller's, we're building a food web. This is a lot different than the modern food chain most Americans rely on. A food chain is a factory-filled engine. Here are the links that usually make up the food chain. Mega feed mills and fertilizer plants --> mega factory farms --> mega processing plants --> mega distributors --> mega supermarkets. And in between all of those things are mega supplies and transportation companies. When one link breaks, the whole chain goes down! Sure, it's made food more affordable. But, it's also made our food system fragile. Let's use the egg recall that's happening right now as an example. It's a conventional egg recall (NOT our eggs, which we have plenty of btw). The current salmonella outbreak has sickened at least 89 people to date. It's affected 1.7 million cartons of eggs in 9 states, starting in March. Hundreds of thousands of people have eaten contaminated eggs. Wow, I mean, that's awful on such a big scale. But, here's what's interesting to me - there are 29 different products affected. How could that be? How could they be related? Well, those products come from 10 different egg brands who all have their eggs packed at 2 facilities. Talk about mega ag! Now, I don't know this for sure, but I would bet that all of those millions of eggs come from one mega-farm that has a salmonella outbreak inside one of its mega buildings. Keep in mind that a CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) is defined as having a minimum of 82,000 laying hens. In other words, it's plausible for those millions of eggs to come from one "farm". And the saddest part? All of those hens were likely culled to stop the outbreak quickly. One last note here -- the egg recall example is actually a small one. It's even worse with beef. Did you know that 85% of all grain finished beef is processed by just 4 companies? Geez! And, I mean, we all saw the food chain break during COVID. On the flip side (and gosh, I'm happy there's an alternative), a food web is a collection of small feed suppliers, farmers, processors, etc. They are all independent, and each has an important role in getting your food to you. When one intersection in the web breaks, it's fairly easy to repair it and find someone else to fill in. It's a resilient way to produce food. The downside to a food web is that the food does cost more. Let's take our egg farmers as an example. They work in small "pods". They all get their feed and cartons from the same place. They all follow the same farming practices. But, other than that, they work independently in "pods". Right now, we have 2 egg pods. A "pod" consists of 1-5 family farmers with small flocks (no more than 3,000 birds each). And that group of farmers has their eggs packed at one small family egg packer. If we need more eggs, then we need to start another pod. If one pod (or a part of a pod) goes down, another can likely fill in. What do you think? Is it worth it to pay more for food from a resilient food web? Do we need the food chain to supply affordable food? What does our food future look like? I'd love to hear from you. Comment below (no account required) or contact us 😊 ----- PS: Did I mention we have plenty pastured, honest yolk, corn & soy free eggs right now? There's no outbreak or shortage for us! ----- Sources Eggs sold at Walmart, other grocers in 9 states recalled amid salmonella outbreakExplainer: How four big companies control the U.S. beef industry

Hidden ingredient in pure maple syrup? Yup, a defoamer! Ours is PUFA free.

I know you've seen it advertised everywhere - "PURE MAPLE SYRUP". But, is it really and truly pure? Not exactly. Why is maple syrup is advertised as "pure" anyway? Well, it's because it's being compared to the Aunt Jemima kind of syrup, which doesn't even have maple syrup in it! It's fake maple syrup made with corn syrup with colors, flavors, thickeners, and preservatives. It mimics maple syrup, but it's definitely not maple syrup. So... for companies that are selling actual maple syrup (you know, the kind that's cooked down from the sweet sap from a maple tree), they like to differentiate their syrup from fake syrups. They do this by calling it "pure". I've even seen it as "100% pure". But, that's not really true either. The dictionary definition of "pure" is "not mixed or adulterated with any other substance or material." Well, in order to make real maple syrup, you kinda need to do just that. Enter defoamers... Here's how maple syrup is made, including when defoamer is used. First, you harvest the sap from the trees. This happens at a specific time of year. In early spring, as the weather starts to warm up, the sap starts flowing. Here are the lines that run through the maple forest in Vermont that our syrup comes from: Then, the sap (which tastes like sweet water), is pumped into a big stainless steel tank: After that, it goes into another big stainless steel pot in the sugar shack (yup, that's what an old fashioned place that makes maple syrup is called). And then, the heat is turned on. Our maple syrup is cooked over a wood stove! As the maple sap cooks down, it bubbles. Like a lot. To prevent the pot from overflowing with maple lava, not only making a mess but also creating a dangerous situation, syrup makers use a little defoamer. A defoamer is a fat that breaks the surface tension on the bubbles. Only a little bit is needed. *There are all kinds of defoamers, natural and absolutely not natural. But first, let's finish making the syrup. Keep scrolling to learn more about defoamers. Here's what those bubbles look like as a defoamer is added: When the bubbles are smaller and the syrup has cooked down to the perfect thickness and specific gravity, it's done! It's drained into another stainless steel pot. Final thickness and color testing is done before it's bottled. The Virkler family is serious about color distinctions. They always keep some super dark and super light syrup around to make it just right. Why is maple syrup different shades anyway? It's a natural thing! It has to do with the changes in the sugars within the sap as the season changes. As the temperature warms up, naturally occurring bacteria become active and break down the sugar into glucose and fructose. These simpler sugars caramelize more easily during boiling, making a darker syrup. That's why lighter syrup is generally made at the beginning of the season when it's colder. But, just like the weather, the color varies throughout the maple syrup season. The Virkler family documents this every year. In the pic below, the first sap of the season is in the bottom left. And then every harvest after that goes to the right and then up to the next row. Pretty neat! And voila! That's how maple syrup is made! What's in a defoamer? A defoamer is a fat. It disrupts surface tension, breaking those syrupy bubbles down, because it contains non-polar molecules that are attracted to water. Conventional Defoamers Conventional defoamers are a blend of who knows what kind of cheap oils. They can be mineral oils, silicone oils, vegetable oils (canola, soy, olive, etc), or other hydrophobic oils. Some contain up to 10% silicone. Did you know "pure" maple syrup can have that in it!? Conventional defoamers are a lab and factory made thing. And you know what that means - the actual ingredients are proprietary. That's 100% allowed, especially since the defoamer ingredients don't need to be listed on the label. It's less than 1% and considered a trace ingredient. Natural Defoamers More natural defoamers are straight oils. For example, our old maple syrup used sunflower oil. I've seen other maple syrup makers use canola oil. But, the most common defoaming oils are seed oils, and that means PUFAs. Natural No PUFA Defoamers In an effort to reduce PUFAs whenever possible, we have a new no PUFA maple syrup! Virkler Farm & Forest uses organic coconut oil as their defoamer. We're so proud to offer it to you! *It's important to note that a really tiny amount of defoamer is used. Whatever is left in the final syrup is a trace amount. But, as I say again and again, if there's a trace amount of something bad in everything you eat, is it a trace amount anymore? So, what should you look for in a natural maple syrup? For the most natural maple syrup, you can look for a few things: From a pristine forest, free of chemicals.No added colors, flavors, thickeners, or preservatives.Boiled with wood to prevent any unnatural fumes from contaminating the syrup.A natural defoamer is used.Bottled in glass. This is particularly important with maple syrup since it's typically bottled hot/warm. Our maple syrup checks all those boxes! Do you use maple syrup? Did you know about defoamers? What's important to you when choose natural foods? I'd love to hear from you. Comment below or send us a message. ----- PS: Did you know that the maple syrup we sell is also used in a bunch of our products? That includes our ice cream, egg custard, maple sausages, chocolate and strawberry syrups, and more!

Here's the untold story of raw milk. Raw or pasteurized? It should be your choice.

Raw milk has been a highly contested issue in modern history. Is it a healthy nutrient-dense “cure-all” for nourishing your body, or is it a dangerous vector for spreading life-threatening disease? The two camps are split. It is a complicated issue with mixed battles of bad science vs. personal testimony, morals vs. politics, education vs. advertising, and big agri-business vs. small farms. Let's dive in...

Shopping for butter? Wondering what makes "the best" natural butter?

Here are the top 6 things to look for when shopping for natural butter:

More from the blog

Food web vs food chain. I'll use the crazy egg recall as an example.

Hidden ingredient in pure maple syrup? Yup, a defoamer! Ours is PUFA free.

Here's the untold story of raw milk. Raw or pasteurized? It should be your choice.

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