8 ms·

One of France's oldest butter producers makes 380 tons per year [video]

193 points by zdw 4y ago

joshu 4y ago
If you're in the South Bay and maybe SF, the Frenchery imports and distributes the butter from Bordier. It is very, very good.
tmilard 4y ago
Nice to see someone so in love and dedicated to a single product.
sctgrhm 4y ago
Very fun to see this here ! I've been to Bordier's shop in St Malo, they do make lovely butter. If you know a bit about France and Brittany, you'll know that "les bretons" are very much fond of their butter. Check out how they make the famous kouign amann and if you get a chance, do have a taste if the quantities of sugar and butter don't put you off ;-)
- bombela 4y ago
  In the bay area, mademoiselle Colette has amazing kouign-amann! They use beurre d'Isigny too.
  - nestorD 4y ago
    I was surprised to discover that several cafés in Berkeley carry kouign-Amann!
    - cylinder714 4y ago
      Before I moved away three years ago, I used to get kouign-amann at Peet's coffee stores outside the immediate Bay Area. I don't know what the situation is now.
- cwizou 4y ago
  Even as a "Normand", I have to agree that this indeed lovely butter ;) To give a bit of context, Bordier is considered very high-end/premium butter that you find mostly at cheesemongers (the large ones you see in the video, they get cut on demand) and Michelin star restaurants (the small cones for example). It's not particularly cheap, but unless you have a local small farm around (doing it the old way, which is probably not much of a thing), it's about as good as butter can get. I stumbled upon that video a few days ago and was a bit surprised that even their "standardised" products (the "plaquettes", aka the rectangles you'll see around the end with striations on them) were still shaped manually.
- galgot 4y ago
  Btw, is salted butter a Brittany thing ? Here in my local epicerie in Paris suburb, can only find "Demi-sel" :(
  - sctgrhm 4y ago
    The three basic butters would be "doux" (unsalted), "demi-sel" and "salé" although the latter does seem to be harder to find in your run-of-the-mill markets and epiceries outside of Brittany.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Wow, amazing they still use the butter paddles to shape and mold the butter manually. There is a great series on YouTube about a Victorian-era cook in an aristocratic house, they had an episode on butter, https://youtu.be/DV7hop4m0YQ https://youtu.be/DV7hop4m0YQ , and the paddles and molding process looked exactly the same as the beginning of this video.
- AlanYx 4y ago
  They're using the paddles mostly for the look of the end product, judging from the patting machine processing shown at the beginning of the video. In Elaine Khosrova's book, "Butter: A Rich History", IIRC she claims that there is a difference in consistency when wooden paddle handling and shaping is used exclusively after the churning stage. That's not really what they're doing here; they're just giving the look of it having been done. Understandable though if they're producing so much.
Fiahil 4y ago
Ah ! I live within 20km of their factory. I would not have expected this on HN. Their butter is, indeed, very good. I always get one of the first spring butter, when the cows get the fresh grass. Creamy and absolutely delicious !
jmcgough 4y ago
yesss I love Bordier, showed this to my partner recently to explain to her why I love nice imported French butters. Traveling there really made me fall in love with French food and the mentality behind a lot of it. Part of what Europe does right is its legal certification process for traditionally made foods, "protected designation of origin" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_designation_of_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_designation_of_origi...). At nicer import stores you can find San Marzano tomatoes with a DOP stamp, so you know it's the real deal. In America we've had a few decades of a race to the bottom, where quality slowly declined in order to generate more profits, until what we have now is unrecognizable from what it originally was.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  Yeah the food situation in the US is pretty sad. I rmb going there in an exchange and the family dad beeming with pride "look I bought you a French baguette", and suffice to say... it was neither French nor a baguette lol. It barely qualified as food for animals.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I live in a US city with a population over 2,000,000 that's seemingly incapable of producing what would be a very mediocre loaf of bread in Paris, for under $12. Actually-good bread simply cannot be had—there isn't any. One consequence of this is that it's impossible to get a decent sandwich here for anything but crazy-high prices. And don't get me started on the croissant situation. Ugh. They're all too-big and disgustingly doughy (90% of them are in this category), or burnt. I have no idea why this is the case, but it is. Like I know baguettes are price controlled so you can't compare those, but I mean any bread at all that's decent and somewhat affordable—simply not a thing here. You'd think someone could do it, but evidently not.
    - boc 4y ago
      I mean, it’s the same reason you can’t find a great mission burrito in Paris. Every city has its own food culture.
nsenifty 4y ago
Claudia Romeo from Food Insider interviewed the super enthusiastic owner of this place. https://youtu.be/ZyXUzhTn0kI https://youtu.be/ZyXUzhTn0kI
- gjvc 4y ago
  This is a much better watch, and features Jean-Yves Bordier before he retired.
- csours 4y ago
  Wow, what a treat! I'm glad I watched this one too. I'm reminded of 'The Logical Song' by Supertramp. They never got to him and I'm glad to see it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=low6Coqrw9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=low6Coqrw9Y
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Wow, how can you not fall in love with people like that! I have so much admiration for people that can be so passionate about their work and what they produce, but at the same time they never see it as just chemistry or a production process, but an art form and their gift to humanity.
frozencell 4y ago
Why are there many post about France on HN?
- SebJansen 4y ago
  Why are there many posts about the US on HN?
sendfoods 4y ago
Eater has been releasing some incredible food-related mini-documentaries! This one is great, too. Gotta get my hands on some of this butter
turtledragonfly 4y ago
"we do everything by hand" ... proceeds to demonstrate large churning machine (: No, I know they're doing a much more manual process than most such factories. I think even the Amish use automation for churning. For reference though, 380 tons is actually a smallish number. Seems France produces about 1000x that much in total, per year, not to mention other countries.
- dhosek 4y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. It’s a bit over a ton a day, which is 250 gallons of milk (well, probably a bit more assuming that it takes more than a pound of milk to make a pound of butter). Kind of like the scene in the first Austin Powers movie where Doctor Evil demands ONE MILLION DOLLARS! and the world leaders laugh.
  - BenjiWiebe 4y ago
    It takes over a pound of cream to make a pound of butter. Whole milk -> skim milk + cream Cream -> buttermilk + butter
    - dhosek 4y ago
      Some quick googling said half a gallon of milk yields half a cup of butter so figure it’s 16:1 whole milk to butter, so that’s 4,000 gallons of milk not 250. A cow can produce 8 gallons of milk a day so we need 250 cows to support this butter production. The Google says 60–80 dairy cows to make a living so figure this represents three or four small dairy farms to support that production level.
- megablast 4y ago
  > 380 tons is actually a smallish number Um, did anyone think any different??
- mrtksn 4y ago
  By hand usually means using machinery to do something the traditional way. People can do very little without machines. The difference is that it’s not a mass production process that usually requires special chemicals and treatments to keep the ingredients in certain state to run high speed high yield process. It’s like the hand made toys that are actually made using power tools, knives, hammers etc. as long as you don’t alter the process but just get help from machines to speed up things or increase yields, it’s handmade.
zahma 4y ago
That stuff is delicious.
rexreed 4y ago
Meanwhile there's a cream shortage here on the east coast US! The price of cream has gone up substantially and was entirely unavailable during Thanksgiving weekend in my local area. No heavy or light cream whatsoever at any store. And now it's 2.5x the price it usually is.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It’s amazing how local diary still is for many things. During covid my parents could barely get milk and meanwhile we were drowning in it.
  - rexreed 4y ago
    Even worse - dairy farms here had to dump milk due to overproduction because there wasn't enough capacity for milk processing to turn into cream and other products. Something is really broken in dairy supply chain and the production lines here. Cream is still not available in our region and hasn't been for months. Some crazy stuff in this article by an Ag producer: https://agmoos.com/2021/12/10/supply-and-demand-are-the-real-story-behind-chaos-in-cream-markets/ https://agmoos.com/2021/12/10/supply-and-demand-are-the-real... And competition between cheese, cream, ice cream makers for tight milk availability: https://nypost.com/2022/10/03/heres-why-the-us-is-facing-a-butter-shortage-ahead-of-holidays/ https://nypost.com/2022/10/03/heres-why-the-us-is-facing-a-b...
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Yeah, and I'm not sure all of those things can be effectively shipped very far (perhaps cheese and ice cream). Around here milk is a bit higher than before, but there's no shortages of anything cow related.
  - ska 4y ago
    > It’s amazing how local diary still is for many things. It's not really surprising, it doesn't ship well or age well (at least, not as liquid). You can do things like UHT but it negatively affects quality and makes it useless for a lot of things.
jcims 4y ago
I just want to dip a spoon in at every step and sample it. About two years ago I bought just about every butter at the local grocery and started sampling them. (COVID hobby i guess) and it completely changed my relationship with butter. I found a few that were clear favorites...to the point where one of them I can slice off a thin pat and just eat it neat. Butter in the abstract is loved, but somehow it has been relegated to commodity status (at least around here). It's fun digging into it and realizing there's a whole landscape out there.
- kleinapple 4y ago
  Could you share the fruits of your labor with us?
  - jcims 4y ago
    I can't really because the actual fruit of my labor is the enrichment of my understanding of butter. It's 100% worth it, I spent maybe $60 on ~10 lbs of butter and it was all used up within a month or two. One other thing I've started to do is leave some butter out all of the time. My grandma used to do this and nobody ever got sick from it. But the butter gets soooo soft and unctuous. Those French butter bell things are a pita, I just use a regular butter dish with a lid.
- rhapsodic 4y ago
  Would you mind sharing which brands were your favorites?
- oppositelock 4y ago
  This really brings back memories of my childhood. I grew up on a small family farm, and all of our butter came from the cream from our own cows. Not only are there huge differences between kinds of butter, there are also huge seasonal differences between the milk produced by cows, and hence, the butter. When dandelions are in bloom, it's going to be yellower and more fragrant, and definitely more sour when the sorrel is sprouting. It was always a surprise what you'd get, even when using the same process.
- 4y ago
mavu 4y ago
These are the links that make me glad that I still visit this site regularly.
stephc_int13 4y ago
If any of you are passing by St Malo (France) the owner has a small restaurant called "Le bistrot autour du beurre" that is excellent for its price. My advice if you also want to buy some butter: unsalted is excellent but it won't taste good for long (pretty much like a fresh baguette). Salted butter has a much longer duration, if you plan to take some home.
rvieira 4y ago
I especially like how they rotate roles between staff. For manual, repetitive work, this is a nice idea to reduce boredom and improve everyone's day, IMO.
emit_time 4y ago
That's like what? $2-3 million worth of butter? Doesn't seem like much for a factory right?

193 points by zdw 4y ago

If you're in the South Bay and maybe SF, the Frenchery imports and distributes the butter from Bordier. It is very, very good.

tmilard 4y ago

Nice to see someone so in love and dedicated to a single product.

sctgrhm 4y ago

Very fun to see this here ! I've been to Bordier's shop in St Malo, they do make lovely butter. If you know a bit about France and Brittany, you'll know that "les bretons" are very much fond of their butter. Check out how they make the famous kouign amann and if you get a chance, do have a taste if the quantities of sugar and butter don't put you off ;-)

bombela 4y ago
In the bay area, mademoiselle Colette has amazing kouign-amann! They use beurre d'Isigny too.
- nestorD 4y ago
  I was surprised to discover that several cafés in Berkeley carry kouign-Amann!
  - cylinder714 4y ago
    Before I moved away three years ago, I used to get kouign-amann at Peet's coffee stores outside the immediate Bay Area. I don't know what the situation is now.
cwizou 4y ago
Even as a "Normand", I have to agree that this indeed lovely butter ;) To give a bit of context, Bordier is considered very high-end/premium butter that you find mostly at cheesemongers (the large ones you see in the video, they get cut on demand) and Michelin star restaurants (the small cones for example). It's not particularly cheap, but unless you have a local small farm around (doing it the old way, which is probably not much of a thing), it's about as good as butter can get. I stumbled upon that video a few days ago and was a bit surprised that even their "standardised" products (the "plaquettes", aka the rectangles you'll see around the end with striations on them) were still shaped manually.
galgot 4y ago
Btw, is salted butter a Brittany thing ? Here in my local epicerie in Paris suburb, can only find "Demi-sel" :(
- sctgrhm 4y ago
  The three basic butters would be "doux" (unsalted), "demi-sel" and "salé" although the latter does seem to be harder to find in your run-of-the-mill markets and epiceries outside of Brittany.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

Wow, amazing they still use the butter paddles to shape and mold the butter manually. There is a great series on YouTube about a Victorian-era cook in an aristocratic house, they had an episode on butter, https://youtu.be/DV7hop4m0YQ https://youtu.be/DV7hop4m0YQ , and the paddles and molding process looked exactly the same as the beginning of this video.

AlanYx 4y ago
They're using the paddles mostly for the look of the end product, judging from the patting machine processing shown at the beginning of the video. In Elaine Khosrova's book, "Butter: A Rich History", IIRC she claims that there is a difference in consistency when wooden paddle handling and shaping is used exclusively after the churning stage. That's not really what they're doing here; they're just giving the look of it having been done. Understandable though if they're producing so much.

Fiahil 4y ago

Ah ! I live within 20km of their factory. I would not have expected this on HN. Their butter is, indeed, very good. I always get one of the first spring butter, when the cows get the fresh grass. Creamy and absolutely delicious !

jmcgough 4y ago

yesss I love Bordier, showed this to my partner recently to explain to her why I love nice imported French butters. Traveling there really made me fall in love with French food and the mentality behind a lot of it. Part of what Europe does right is its legal certification process for traditionally made foods, "protected designation of origin" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_designation_of_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_designation_of_origi...). At nicer import stores you can find San Marzano tomatoes with a DOP stamp, so you know it's the real deal. In America we've had a few decades of a race to the bottom, where quality slowly declined in order to generate more profits, until what we have now is unrecognizable from what it originally was.

xwolfi 4y ago
Yeah the food situation in the US is pretty sad. I rmb going there in an exchange and the family dad beeming with pride "look I bought you a French baguette", and suffice to say... it was neither French nor a baguette lol. It barely qualified as food for animals.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I live in a US city with a population over 2,000,000 that's seemingly incapable of producing what would be a very mediocre loaf of bread in Paris, for under $12. Actually-good bread simply cannot be had—there isn't any. One consequence of this is that it's impossible to get a decent sandwich here for anything but crazy-high prices. And don't get me started on the croissant situation. Ugh. They're all too-big and disgustingly doughy (90% of them are in this category), or burnt. I have no idea why this is the case, but it is. Like I know baguettes are price controlled so you can't compare those, but I mean any bread at all that's decent and somewhat affordable—simply not a thing here. You'd think someone could do it, but evidently not.
  - boc 4y ago
    I mean, it’s the same reason you can’t find a great mission burrito in Paris. Every city has its own food culture.

nsenifty 4y ago

Claudia Romeo from Food Insider interviewed the super enthusiastic owner of this place. https://youtu.be/ZyXUzhTn0kI https://youtu.be/ZyXUzhTn0kI

gjvc 4y ago
This is a much better watch, and features Jean-Yves Bordier before he retired.
csours 4y ago
Wow, what a treat! I'm glad I watched this one too. I'm reminded of 'The Logical Song' by Supertramp. They never got to him and I'm glad to see it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=low6Coqrw9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=low6Coqrw9Y
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Wow, how can you not fall in love with people like that! I have so much admiration for people that can be so passionate about their work and what they produce, but at the same time they never see it as just chemistry or a production process, but an art form and their gift to humanity.

frozencell 4y ago

Why are there many post about France on HN?

SebJansen 4y ago
Why are there many posts about the US on HN?

sendfoods 4y ago

Eater has been releasing some incredible food-related mini-documentaries! This one is great, too. Gotta get my hands on some of this butter

turtledragonfly 4y ago

"we do everything by hand" ... proceeds to demonstrate large churning machine (: No, I know they're doing a much more manual process than most such factories. I think even the Amish use automation for churning. For reference though, 380 tons is actually a smallish number. Seems France produces about 1000x that much in total, per year, not to mention other countries.

dhosek 4y ago
I was thinking the same thing. It’s a bit over a ton a day, which is 250 gallons of milk (well, probably a bit more assuming that it takes more than a pound of milk to make a pound of butter). Kind of like the scene in the first Austin Powers movie where Doctor Evil demands ONE MILLION DOLLARS! and the world leaders laugh.
- BenjiWiebe 4y ago
  It takes over a pound of cream to make a pound of butter. Whole milk -> skim milk + cream Cream -> buttermilk + butter
  - dhosek 4y ago
    Some quick googling said half a gallon of milk yields half a cup of butter so figure it’s 16:1 whole milk to butter, so that’s 4,000 gallons of milk not 250. A cow can produce 8 gallons of milk a day so we need 250 cows to support this butter production. The Google says 60–80 dairy cows to make a living so figure this represents three or four small dairy farms to support that production level.
megablast 4y ago
> 380 tons is actually a smallish number Um, did anyone think any different??
mrtksn 4y ago
By hand usually means using machinery to do something the traditional way. People can do very little without machines. The difference is that it’s not a mass production process that usually requires special chemicals and treatments to keep the ingredients in certain state to run high speed high yield process. It’s like the hand made toys that are actually made using power tools, knives, hammers etc. as long as you don’t alter the process but just get help from machines to speed up things or increase yields, it’s handmade.

zahma 4y ago

That stuff is delicious.

rexreed 4y ago

Meanwhile there's a cream shortage here on the east coast US! The price of cream has gone up substantially and was entirely unavailable during Thanksgiving weekend in my local area. No heavy or light cream whatsoever at any store. And now it's 2.5x the price it usually is.

bombcar 4y ago
It’s amazing how local diary still is for many things. During covid my parents could barely get milk and meanwhile we were drowning in it.
- rexreed 4y ago
  Even worse - dairy farms here had to dump milk due to overproduction because there wasn't enough capacity for milk processing to turn into cream and other products. Something is really broken in dairy supply chain and the production lines here. Cream is still not available in our region and hasn't been for months. Some crazy stuff in this article by an Ag producer: https://agmoos.com/2021/12/10/supply-and-demand-are-the-real-story-behind-chaos-in-cream-markets/ https://agmoos.com/2021/12/10/supply-and-demand-are-the-real... And competition between cheese, cream, ice cream makers for tight milk availability: https://nypost.com/2022/10/03/heres-why-the-us-is-facing-a-butter-shortage-ahead-of-holidays/ https://nypost.com/2022/10/03/heres-why-the-us-is-facing-a-b...
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yeah, and I'm not sure all of those things can be effectively shipped very far (perhaps cheese and ice cream). Around here milk is a bit higher than before, but there's no shortages of anything cow related.
- ska 4y ago
  > It’s amazing how local diary still is for many things. It's not really surprising, it doesn't ship well or age well (at least, not as liquid). You can do things like UHT but it negatively affects quality and makes it useless for a lot of things.

jcims 4y ago

I just want to dip a spoon in at every step and sample it. About two years ago I bought just about every butter at the local grocery and started sampling them. (COVID hobby i guess) and it completely changed my relationship with butter. I found a few that were clear favorites...to the point where one of them I can slice off a thin pat and just eat it neat. Butter in the abstract is loved, but somehow it has been relegated to commodity status (at least around here). It's fun digging into it and realizing there's a whole landscape out there.

kleinapple 4y ago
Could you share the fruits of your labor with us?
- jcims 4y ago
  I can't really because the actual fruit of my labor is the enrichment of my understanding of butter. It's 100% worth it, I spent maybe $60 on ~10 lbs of butter and it was all used up within a month or two. One other thing I've started to do is leave some butter out all of the time. My grandma used to do this and nobody ever got sick from it. But the butter gets soooo soft and unctuous. Those French butter bell things are a pita, I just use a regular butter dish with a lid.
rhapsodic 4y ago
Would you mind sharing which brands were your favorites?
oppositelock 4y ago
This really brings back memories of my childhood. I grew up on a small family farm, and all of our butter came from the cream from our own cows. Not only are there huge differences between kinds of butter, there are also huge seasonal differences between the milk produced by cows, and hence, the butter. When dandelions are in bloom, it's going to be yellower and more fragrant, and definitely more sour when the sorrel is sprouting. It was always a surprise what you'd get, even when using the same process.
4y ago

mavu 4y ago

These are the links that make me glad that I still visit this site regularly.

stephc_int13 4y ago

If any of you are passing by St Malo (France) the owner has a small restaurant called "Le bistrot autour du beurre" that is excellent for its price. My advice if you also want to buy some butter: unsalted is excellent but it won't taste good for long (pretty much like a fresh baguette). Salted butter has a much longer duration, if you plan to take some home.

rvieira 4y ago

I especially like how they rotate roles between staff. For manual, repetitive work, this is a nice idea to reduce boredom and improve everyone's day, IMO.

emit_time 4y ago

That's like what? $2-3 million worth of butter? Doesn't seem like much for a factory right?