Butter Budget Busting

Where does all the butter go? It seems like I keep on buying the stuff. But I’m not a baker. Mostly I cook with extra virgin olive oil. Yes, I break out the butter on Friday night for Shabbat, and slather it all over my challah. I love a holiday that encourages personal decadence and living richly, especially when it comes once a week.

Maybe it’s the corn. Every week we get several ears from the CSA. I’ve been fire roasting them on the gas grill and putting out a half stick of butter on the table. I love these summer suppers.

Part of it has to be Young Master Fussy too. In my effort to try and fatten him up, I’ve created a scrambled egg lover. Really, he just loves my scrambled eggs. You’ll never guess the secret ingredient. These eggs are far too rich for my blood, but occasionally I’ll sneak a bite. Oh man, are they good. So, so buttery.

But it was when i was checking out of Trader Joe’s yesterday that I realized I might have a problem.

The butter I had bought was 20% of my grocery bill.

That’s $12 of butter on a $60 tab. It breaks down into a pound of salted, a pound of unsalted, and an eight ounce tub of fancy Kriemhild grass fed butter. I was really excited to see the latter, because I’ve heard good things and I’ve yet to try it. This will be my special Shabbat butter this week.

Salted butter is the workhorse in the Fussy household. If left to my own devices, I’d only buy the unsalted and add salt myself. But being married is all about making compromises.

I picked up the pound of unsalted butter because in preparations for cooler weather, I’m looking forward to making another batch of ghee. I haven’t been doing a lot Indian cooking this summer, but slow simmered legumes and pulses are going to be coming back to my kitchen soon.

When it comes to butter, I choose to buy organic, mostly as a hedge against milk produced from animals treated with rBST and fed subtherapeutic levels of antibiotics. That’s important to me, and I’m prepared to pay the premium for it.

Although at the Wegmans in Princeton, I could get organic butter for $4 a pound. It’s pushing $5 a pound at Trader Joe’s. But I just saw Shop Rite selling the mass produced Horizon Organic butter for the everyday high price of $8 a pound. Wow.

Sure, that’s about the same price or even a bit lower than I’m paying for the Kriemhild and those smaller production French and Italian butters I love so much. But those products aren’t even in the same league as the run of the mill Horizon Organic stuff.

It always makes me nervous when I see outliers like that on the grocery price spectrum. I tend to see them as a harbinger of what’s to come. Prices creep up slowly over time. There’s nothing that can be done about that. But if one regional chain is charging twice the price for a nationally available product, perhaps those increases are already on their way.

Thankfully, Young Master Fussy actually prefers his scrambled eggs made with bacon fat.