Why is caramel suddenly on every hot restaurant’s dessert menu, while butterscotch has long been relegated to mass-produced pudding cups? The Washington Post offers some compelling theories—one being that pastry chefs don’t know what real butterscotch tastes like. Shuna Fish Lydon of eggbeater (who first lamented the shunning of the ‘scotch in a post last summer) explains to the Post:
“Even really famous San Francisco pastry chefs aren’t making homemade butterscotch” when they do serve butterscotch-flavored desserts, he wrote in an e-mail. “They’re using the chips and/or adding Scotch, both of which are very, very wrong.”
The real deal is made with just caramelized sugar and butter, cooked to a seductive golden-brown. And that word, butter—with its connotations of sinful saturated-fattiness—may be another of the downtrodden dessert’s problems in this dieting-obsessed country.
It wouldn’t be the first food with that word in the name to provoke negative reactions. One might think that in chowish circles people would know that buttermilk is actually quite low in lipids, but I feel like I’m always hearing otherwise educated eaters refer to it as rich and fatty.
And like butterscotch, most buttermilk that is on the commercial market these days is a crude approximation of the real thing: Instead of simply selling the liquid that remains when butter is churned, dairy companies generally create “buttermilk” by adding a culture of lactic acid bacteria to pasteurized milk (most often nonfat milk) and it may or may not have added butter flecks(!). True buttermilk is hard to come by in the States—but is it also, as rumor has it, illegal?
Evan’s Farmhouse Creamery (top rated organic dairy in the North East by the Cornucopia Institute) makes a great buttermilk.
did they really call Shuna “he”? Shuna’s a she!
Mass-market cookbooks of the 1950s and 1960s (Betty Crocker cookbooks in particular) have quite a number of butterscotch desserts. Sometimes the only butterscotchy thing about them is their inclusion of brown sugar…so misuse of butterscotch is nothing new. However, this does not make butterscotch chips any less horrid.
Shuna does not identify Shuna with the female pronoun. It’s explained on Eggbeater.
Thanks for the buttermilk tip, serveitforth. Anyone else know of good regional dairies that make the real stuff (not just cultured milk)? It would be fun to get a list going here–Chowhound doesn’t have one, and Google is terribly unhelpful on the matter. Also, it seems like a lot of farms that you might expect to sell buttermilk (Ronnybrook Farm, for example) actually don’t.
I was really surprised by the almost-smoky deliciousness of the butterscotch budino (pudding) at Mozza, recently the topic of much discussion on the LA board. (It is made from scratch, though not with buttermilk; LAT recently had an article with the recipe.) When I thought about it, I had absolutely no idea what butterscotch was… I just knew I didn’t like the yellow stuff that’s offered up as an alternative to hot fudge on sundaes.