America's Best Butter Will Be Available For Purchase For Just One Day Next Month
What do The French Laundry, Per Se, Menton, No. 9 Park, and The Inn at Little Washington have in common? Besides being among the very best restaurants in America, they all also serve butter that's handmade by a Vermont dairy farmer named Diane St. Clair that's quite possibly the very best butter produced in America today. It's produced in such small quantities that the vast majority of it goes to her restaurant clients, but occasionally some is made available for purchase – and the next opportunity the public will be able to buy some for themselves will be on December 15.
As we've previously described, the butter comes from St. Clair's 10 Jersey cows, whose milk has the highest butterfat percentage of any cow. Because they graze in late spring, summer, and fall, the flavor of the butter changes throughout the year. "The butter really expresses the terroir of the land the cows graze on," St. Clair told us. "It has a grassy taste in the spring, and in the fall it has more of a wildflower, floral complexity." St. Clair hand-skims the cream from the milk, cultures it for 24 hours with her own buttermilk, and churns and kneads it by hand.
If you want to taste this bright yellow butter for yourself, you can either book a table at one of the afore-mentioned restaurants or try your hand at placing an order for it. According to an Instagram post, it'll be sold exclusively at New York's Saxelby Cheesemongers, and it'll go on sale on December 15 at exactly 9 a.m. ET, at a whopping $50 per pound.