Better = Butter.

Butter. Yes, the chubby little baker inside me decided that this week, our favourite food is butter. And not just to eat straight from the stick, but to bake with! Why? Because everything is better with butter. <3 


Specifically, I bake with Unsalted Sweet Cream Butter. But I do use salted butter to cook with. 

Yes, this is the amount of butter I have on hand in my house.

I bake... a lot.

Ingredients: Milk. 
Holy moley. If you want to get technical with your butter, here are some terms you might want to know... (PS, I totally stole the following italicized information from http://www.foodsci.uoguelph.ca/dairyedu/butter.html)



Milkfat
- the lipid components of milk, as produced by the cow, and found in commercial milk and milk-derived products, mostly comprised of triglyceride.
Butterfat
- almost synonymous with milkfat; all of the fat components in milk that are separable by churning.
Anhydrous Milkfat (AMF)
- the commercially- prepared extraction of cow's milkfat, found in bulk or concentrated form (comprised of 100% fat, but not necessarily all of the lipid components of milk).
Butteroil
- synonomous with anhydrous milkfat; (conventional terminology in the fats and oils field differentiates an oil from a fat based on whether it is liquid at room temp. or solid, but very arbitrary).
Butter 
- a water-in-oil emulsion, comprised of >80% milkfat, but also containing water in the form of tiny droplets, perhaps some milk solids-not-fat, with or without salt (sweet butter); texture is a result of working/kneading during processing at appropriate temperatures, to establish fat crystalline network that results in desired smoothness (compare butter with melted and recrystallized butter); used as a spread, a cooking fat, or a baking ingredient.

My butter came from Target, but really you can get butter anywhere!

Where did my butter come from before I got it from Target? Well, what I gathered is that they have a food distribution center in Phoenix, Arizona. Unfortunately my buttery goodness had to travel to get to it's nice little location into the Menifee Super Target. Where did it come from before that? Where was the cattle raised to get the milk that got churned to make this amazing-ness that we call butter? -___- I have no idea. I feel like I rephrased the question about 600 times before Google gave up on me. I did find an email address to contact Target (specifically if you had a health concern with their food products) and this is what I said:

Hello! I just had a couple of questions about where you butter is manufactured.

Is it made here in the US, any state in particular? Where are the cattle raised? You use rBST free cattle? Do you use any other anti-biotics or pesticides on them? 

Thanks for the help, I'm doing a project on butter, and since I generally use MP Butter for my baking, I figure I'd do the research specifically on it. 

When they get back to me, I'll attach their email into another post. :]

If I had to make a general assumption, I'd say that this butter is made here in the US - I might even be bold enough to say that it came from California (cuz you know, happy cows come from California...) I did discover that SuperValu/ PFresh handle Target's foods, and those are big name companies - So they run big farms, so they're benefiting from high turnover. I did look to see if they were sustainable (I couldn't find anything on them making butter specifically) and you can find that info right here. http://www.supervalu.com/sv-webapp/about/envstewardship.jsp

Switching gears: Health affects... I know this says SALTED and I use UNsalted for my baking, but for all intents and purposes, I thought this was a pretty sweet little break down.

http://www.livestrong.com/thedailyplate/nutrition-calories/food/market-pantry/butter-salted-sweet-cream/

This was a breakdown from Livestrong.com as to how to burn off your butter calories (based on the average weight of 150). It changed when I refreshed the page.
It assumed because I'm a woman, I like laundry and mopping ahahaha.

Butter is terrible for you, terrible and delicious. But you can do all sorts of things with it besides baking. You can cook (saute, fry, brown, glaze, thicken, ect.) with it, you can sculpt it, you can just straight eat it, if you're  really feeling that bold. Just watch Julia Child... She'll inspire you to use butter.  And don't get me wrong, you can use alternative forms of fats to cook/bake with that might be healthier and debatable as delicious (olive oil, shortening, coconut oil), but that's not really as much fun. I figure if something unhealthy is gonna take me down, I'll gladly go down with butter.