Discovering French Butter

We travel to France to see how butter is made – that’s every step of the process before it lands in the Middle East’s supermarkets, from milking the cows all the way through to packaging the butter ready for sale.

- Daniel Bardsley

Few gourmet cooks could live without butter, since it forms an essential part of countless thousands of recipes.It versatility stems in part from the fact that it is available in numerous forms – including raw butter, spreadable butter and clarified butter – not to mention myriad tempting flavours. Fancy seaweed butter or strawberry butter? Or maybe gingerbread-style or herb butter is more your thing.

There is no country more enthusiastic about butter than France, where residents consume around 8kg a year, the highest per capita figure in the world and double the EU average.

Within France, the Brittany and Normandy regions, which lie in France’s fertile northwest, have long had a strong association with butter production, so our visit began there with a trip to a family farm not far from the city of Nantes in Brittany.

While in some parts of the world milk production has become industrialised, with vast facilities containing thousands of cows, here smaller concerns, like the Rondeau family farm, are happily still the norm.

Nestled in lush countryside, this farm has around 170 Holstein cows that for more than half the year are allowed to graze freely in grass fields. Again, this sits in stark contrast to some industrialised farms where the animals do not go outside.

The cows are milked twice a day, between around 6.30am to 8.30am, and between 4.30pm and 6.30pm, and strict procedures are followed to maintain hygiene, with the udders being cleaned before each milking.

Average production per cow is around 30 litres per day, a relatively modest figure. In some farms about twice as much milk may be collected from each animal, but for butter production, smaller volumes are taken to maintain a high fat content.

Taking less milk also extends the milking life of the cows, with the oldest individual at this farm now 12 years of age.