The Infamous Irish Butter Post of 2010

So, I have seen KerryGold Irish butter in the stores before and scoffed. I mean what makes Irish butter so special I’d want to pay three times the cost of regular butter?
Then I went to Ireland.

As I have mentioned, their cows are grass fed on small-medium family farms and a “large” factory in Ireland, like the Guiness or Jameson facilities, are still tiny compared to the juggernauts of US and Chinese industrial centers.
So when I tasted their butter, I tasted cool days and fresh rain and the joys of locally produced everything.
The best meal we had in Ireland was smoked salmon from the Irish sea sliced thin and laid on freshly baked brown bread which had been generously slathered with Irish butter.

Costco is carrying KerryGold right now and Matt and I bought some. I am not sure what to do here as I am trapped between wanting to sit down and just eat it from the package but also save it forever since they are only carrying it for St. Pat’s.
Today, I cooked with it. Made omelets. When I make sweet potato gnocchi later in the week, I will also use it for the brown butter sauce. Because here is th true magic of Irish butter- you can cook with it. I mean seriously, fry things in it. It won’t scald and burn like American butter! Something about the grass-fed cows puts less or different sugars in the butter that will caramelize intead of scorch.

Also? Tasty! Tasty like butter should be- creamy and heavy, not waxy. There is no “anatto coloring” in it to make it a rich velvetty yellow. Not fake vanilla ice cream yellow, but a soft, golden color like summer sunshine in the late afternoon, a shade that can never never be reached by chemical means. This is farmer’s market butter, this is small batch butter, this is butter our like grandparents ate and what our ancestors ate and passed on the desire for it to every generation after. This is butter so delicious, ancient Celts buried it in the peat bogs to preserve it and to offer it as tribute to their gods. This butter is so awesome that ancient peat butter pulled from the bogs is still edible, and I would be so game to try it, were it not for them being labeled as a National Treasure. But damn, butter so good it is a NATIONAL TREASURE! (but also, on display in a museum for decades and yeah, not so edible any longer. Ew.)

Things I have learned in the last few years- life is too short to eat crappy food. And life is seriously too short for inferior butter. I have also learned that I need to go back to Costo pronto and get a stash of KerryGold to hold me til next March.