At Melbourne restaurant Etta, Rosheen Kaul browns rich Jersey milk butter until it resembles caramel. After smoking it over a red gum fire for hours, the chef chills it, whips it and presents the spread with smoked salt alongside the restaurant’s sourdough bread. “In the past, we’ve done a wild garlic butter, a white soy and garlic butter and a few other iterations – a favourite being our roast chicken fat and maple syrup butter with chives, lemon and crispy chicken skin.” But smoked brown butter remains the biggest hit and backs up trend watchers’ claims that “butter’s appeal is eternal”.
Kaul thinks butter is having a moment because restaurants are devoting as much thought to their bread course as the rest of the menu. “Where butter has often played second fiddle to bread, it’s become a really wonderful creative outlet for chefs where every single bite is considered,” she says.
It’s an ingredient Ben Shewry knows well. His father is a New Zealand dairy farmer who refers to raw milk as “bovine wine”. In the early days of his career, Shewry created sculptures out of butter and margarine for hotel buffets, with shapes ranging from pyramids to an eagle that required scaffolding.
But when Shewry became head chef of Melbourne’s Attica in 2005, he couldn’t source any good locally made butter. “We bought, at an incredible cost, Jersey cream,” he says. The team cultured and churned it, making butter from scratch for close to a decade.
During his time at Sydney’s Yellow, chef Neville Dsouza recalls handling 20-litre batches of cream during butter-making sessions. “The cream would spill everywhere if not done properly,” he says. “It was a nightmare, but also a very rewarding experience.”
In the years he’s cooked at Melbourne’s Attica, Shewry counts roasted yeast butter as “one of the best things we’ve ever made”. The restaurant has also produced a butter mixed with wild local seaweed, and another with Attica’s version of Vegemite. But he believes compound butters can’t compete with the original: “Plain butter is better.”
Fortunately for restaurants and diners, these days it’s easier to source good Australian-made butter from a supplier. Wheels of Pepe Saya – a cultured butter made in Sydney’s south – grace restaurant tables across the country, from Perth’s Lulu La Delizia to Melbourne’s Aru. At Irene’s Enmore – the Sydney restaurant where Dsouza currently works – the butter comes from Meander Valley Dairy in Tasmania.
But none of this explains why restaurants are seemingly serving supersized butter portions. The bread plate at Irene’s Enmore comes with a wave of churned cream, which looks generous to me – then a friend shares a photo of what she was allocated at Melbourne’s Victor Churchill: this butter serve has so many peaks, it resembles the Sydney Opera House. At Cafe Paci in the city’s inner west, chef Pasi Petanen whips beurre noisette (brown butter) through bought cultured butter, and offers a mini-mountain of the spread with sticky potato and molasses bread.
It seems to me, a butter minimalist, like a staggering amount of churned cream, but it’s actually a logical move, says restaurant manager Cam Fairbairn. “From a service point of view, it’s way easier to load people up than to have to keep refilling people’s requests for extra butter,” he explains.
But it’s not always an efficient service hack. “A table [of three] yesterday asked for butter three times,” says Dsouza. “So it’s really hard to identify if any amount of butter is enough.”
From a health perspective, however, there is such a thing as too much. “Butter is mostly composed of saturated fats, which previously have been linked to increased risk of heart disease,” says Dr Evangeline Mantzioris, program director of nutrition and food sciences at the University of South Australia. Recent research indicates butter isn’t as “problematic” as we once thought, she says, but it’s not a great idea to overdo it.
As someone who only requires two knife swipes of butter, I feel guilty that I can barely dent the big yellow banks served by restaurants. And while the internet is full of wild reuses for recycling butter, from de-squeaking doors to removing leg wax, Food Standards Australia New Zealand prevents businesses from such creativity – if a diner doesn’t finish their butter, it can’t be recycled for future consumption. “There’s nothing you can do with it once it’s been on a table,” says Shewry. “It has to go into the compost.”
Despite my undereating, I’m shocked to learn not much butter gets wasted at all. Dsouza estimates 85% of what’s served at Irene’s Enmore gets consumed. At Cafe Paci, it’s 90%. “Requests for extra butter definitely come through, too,” says Fairbairn.
So what’s with the immense appetite for churned cream? Dsouza thinks there’s a post-lockdown “Yolo” effect.
Although Pepe Saya’s restaurant sales are skyrocketing, “lord knows not everyone is buying Pepe Saya for their butter needs on the reg”, says Fairbairn. “Most people probably don’t go too hard on butter at home.”
