Back to Butter: A Traditional Foods Cookbook - Nourishing Recipes Inspired by Our Ancestors (3 page)

What does
traditional foods
mean, you ask? The genre of traditional foods is powerfully emerging into the modern food landscape, yet the concepts on which it’s based have strong, historical roots. Traditional foods utilize the culinary and farming techniques that consistently kept primitive cultures, cut off from the processed foods and medicine of modern societies, healthy, happy, and fertile. These techniques included grass-grazing animals; organic vegetable production; soaking grains, nuts, and seeds for improved digestion; drinking whole, raw dairy products; the inclusion of saturated fats and fermented foods; and more. These techniques may be new to you, and if a detailed explanation sounds helpful, know that’s exactly what you’ll find here. The Traditional Foods Pantry section of this cookbook is designed to thoroughly teach everything you need to know to master the recipes in part II. And while it helps to read over this chapter before you begin cooking, if you’re more type B than A, we include page links within each recipe that connect back to each applicable technique, so either way, you’re covered!

CHAPTER 1
FATS & OILS

Currently, two extremes seem to dominate our food culture. Let’s give them team names.
Team Non-Fat Yogurt
debates every single calorie. Fat is the enemy, while weight and moods of their team members unpredictably waffle or stay steadily low due to an overall lack of consumption. This team is rightfully seeking health, but their definition of what creates it is distorting their results. On the flip side,
Team Fast Food
has never met a food label that couldn’t be ignored. Though rightfully focused on simple enjoyment and good flavor, the offerings of our modern food supply hijack all health in the process. Dinner often prompts the question
where
to eat, instead of
what. Team Fast Food
’s weight is inevitably very high, but surprisingly, a few malnourished skinny folks are on the roster as well. Regardless of how high or low the scale registers, however, the dismal reality is that both
Team Non-Fat Yogurt
and
Team Fast Food
are
undernourished
and ultimately, unsatisfied at the core.

To further our understanding of true nourishment, let’s try an exercise. One afternoon, when the midday munchies attack, eat a juicy apple, a bunch of grapes, a few carrot sticks, and maybe a cucumber—as much as you want. Totally gorge yourself on fruits and vegetables. Afterward, monitor how long you remain satisfied. The next day at snack time, thinly slice one handful of radishes, top each with a sizable lump of grass-fed, full-fat butter, sprinkle on a little sea salt, and enjoy. Again, take note of how long you remain satisfied.
Spoiler alert:
the butter will likely win by a confident margin. This exercise reveals a very simple truth: fat makes us feel satisfied! And better still, despite what you may have heard, true, unadulterated fats don’t actually make us fat—carbohydrates do.

Let’s try another exercise. For two weeks, focus on raising the level of healthy fats in your diet, such as the ones we discuss in detail later in this section. Sauté all your vegetables in real butter, eat plain whole-milk, full-fat yogurt, and try bacon for breakfast with a side of eggs scrambled in the bacon drippings.
But avoid grains and sugar.
No bread. No dessert. No bagels. At the end of the week, check your belt notches. Feel a difference? You probably will. Now imagine doing the diet in reverse, forgetting about fat and instead focusing on raising the amount of grains and sugars in your diet. Doughnuts for
breakfast, burritos for lunch, cake for dessert—you get the picture. Chances are, at the end of two weeks, you wouldn’t need to check your belt because you’ll already feel like a stuffed tick. Lesson learned: Healthy fats don’t make us fat. Excess grains and sugars do.

But what about fried foods? If fats don’t make us fat, why do we get fat when we eat too much fast food? Because … not all fats are created equal. Fats have something called a smoke point, which is a temperature at which the oil will literally smoke, burn, and turn rancid—and rancid oils are toxic to our bodies. Animal lard, for example, has a high smoke point, making it an ideal fat for the high temperature required for deep frying. Up until the late 1980s, a typical burger joint fried their onion rings and fries in beef lard (tallow). Nowadays, however, refined vegetable oil is used. The key word here is
refined
. Vegetable oils have a low smoke point, making them a terrible choice for frying. Therefore, low-smoke-point oils such as corn oil must be refined (
processed
) in order to handle that excess heat. But why go through all that trouble when tallow works perfectly fine without alteration? Because refined vegetable oils are dirt cheap, and therein lies the problem.

The substitution of refined vegetable oils doesn’t seem to be making our society any healthier. As you can see, the goal of
Team Non-Fat Yogurt
might be health, but completely removing all fat (
and flavor
) from the diet isn’t the answer. And while the goal of
Team Fast Food
might be flavor, we believe flavor can be achieved without sacrificing health.

Fat isn’t to be feared. Fat is to be understood.
Responsibility rests on the shoulders of each of us not only to step into the kitchen but also to form a basic understanding of real food, including fats. Because much of this information has been cast aside over the past several generations, let’s examine each of the healthy, unrefined fats used in the Traditional Foods diet (and this cookbook) more closely.

The stability or instability of the molecular structure of these two types of fats is in fact altered when temperatures rise. Stable saturated fats remain undisturbed by high heat, while the unstable molecular structure of unsaturated fat causes it to burn and break down quickly under relatively
moderate temperatures. And as we’ve learned, burnt oil is rancid and unsafe for consumption. Although refinement can make rancid oil
palatable
, no amount of refinement can make it wholesome to consume. As such, unadulterated saturated fats are best for cooking, while unsaturated fats are best for low- to no-heat applications (such as salad dressings). Every fat has its place. We just need to know how to use them properly!

To complicate things a little bit, we must mention that fats and oils all contain
both
saturated and unsaturated fats in their constitution. Similar to how all human beings have both masculine and feminine properties, each fat is a mixture—yet they take on the characteristics of the dominant percentage. An easy way to determine whether a fat is more saturated or unsaturated is by analyzing its texture when at room temperature. Saturated fat is thick at room temperature, such as represented in lard, tallow, coconut oil, butter, and ghee. All of these fats contain a higher percentage of saturated fat. Unsaturated fat, on the other hand, is liquid at room temperature, as in walnut oil, sesame oil, flax oil, and olive oil.

Unsaturated fats also break down further into subcategories (polyunsaturated and monounsaturated), which affect each oil’s composition, but in more subtle ways that are beyond the scope of this book.

UNDERSTANDING SATURATED AND UNSATURATED FATS

Saturated Fat = Stable = Thick at Room Temperature

Unsaturated Fat = Unstable = Liquid at Room Temperature

FATS TEMPERATURE LEGEND

Best for High Heat
(e.g., frying onion rings): Ghee, Lard, Tallow

Best for Medium Heat
(e.g., browning onions): Butter, Coconut Oil

Best for Low Heat
(e.g., sweating onions): Extra-Virgin Olive Oil

Cold Use Only
(e.g. raw onions): Walnut Oil, Sesame Oil, Flax Oil

BUTTER:
THE FRIENDLY FAT

TYPE:
Saturated/Solid at Room Temperature

SMOKE POINT:
Medium Heat

LOOK FOR:
Organic, Unsalted, and Pastured/Grass-Fed

DESCRIPTION:
Butter is a saturated fat that never should have fallen from grace. Its plastic counterpart, better known as margarine, entered our kitchens after World War II, and though it maintains its space on supermarket shelves, it is simply not real food. That said, not all real butter is created equal. The vitamin and nutritional content of butter made from the milk of cows that grazed on pasture under the open sun is far superior to that in the butter of factory-farmed cows. Instead of allocating funds for vitamins, consider purchasing a quality grass-fed butter, commonly known as pastured butter in the store. And when you find it, try the Fresh Herb–Crusted Sea Bass with Sourdough Bread Crumbs (
page 118
). Oh my!

GHEE:
BUTTER’S KIN

TYPE
:
Saturated/Solid at Room Temperature

SMOKE POINT
:
High Heat

LOOK FOR
:
Organic and Pastured/Grass-Fed

DESCRIPTION
:
When butter is gently simmered over low heat, the milk solids eventually fall to the bottom, leaving behind a clear yellow, clarified liquid called ghee. Because the milk solids have been removed, ghee has a higher smoke point than butter does and can be used to properly fry foods. The absence of milk solids also means that many lactose-intolerant people can tolerate ghee. As with butter, we prefer to use ghee made from the butter of grass-fed cows. Scallops brown beautifully with ghee, as in the Seared Scallops with Creamy Carrot Purée (
page 114
).