By Cindy Green

Bill Stoll may be retiring, but he isn’t giving up his quest for a superior butter. The AURI food scientist misses that old-fashioned, rich flavor he enjoyed growing up as the son of a creamery manager and champion butter maker

It’s not just nostalgia, Stoll insists — butter really did have more flavor back then.

That’s because, when farmers separated their own milk and waited for the cream truck, they didn’t have modern refrigeration to keep it sweet. Some had cool wells or caves “but the cream was susceptible to microorganisms that grew in those conditions,” Stoll says. “Back in the good old days we had all kinds of wild fermentation.” Cream at various stages of fermentation was commingled in the creamery, where any acidity was neutralized with sodium hydroxide.

The result? “Butter had lots of flavor because of the fermentation. “I can still remember the taste of that butter.” Today, such “cultured butter” can only be found in Europe, Canada and a few specialty grocers in the United States.

As the dairy industry changed, milk was collected whole and separated in the creamery where it was kept cool and sweet — the butter we know today. The most flavorful domestic butter, recommended by Martha Stewart, is Land O’ Lakes’ unsalted, made with a starter derived from a butter culture. That gives the butter more intense flavor than the salted variety made without culture, Stoll says.

Better begins with a ‘B’

Stoll tried capturing the flavor of cultured butter right out of graduate school, conducting research at South Dakota State University in Brookings. He developed a procedure for making culture-flavored butter under controlled conditions.

“The problem was the government had things set up so it wasn’t an economic advantage to produce this kind of butter,” Stoll says. Butter pricing was and still is based on the USDA grading system, from AA down to C. Grade is based on the presence or absence of “off flavors,” which are the result of fermentation or other conditions that affect cream’s flavor. AA has no fermented flavors.

In Stoll’s opinion, B grade tastes best because it contains fermented flavors without being too strong. The flavorful butter he developed would have been labeled B grade, and manufacturers would have had to sell it for less than AA butter.

“So manufacturers wouldn’t make anything but AA or they paid the penalty.”

Who defines quality?

At Green Giant, Stoll worked on the butter sauce for frozen vegetables. He recommended using a lower grade butter for improved flavor and money savings, but marketers wouldn’t bite, arguing that consumers assume the AA label means superior butter.

Does that mean Stoll is doomed in his determination to produce tastier butter? Perhaps not. Recently, he found cultured butter selling for $8 a pound at Byerly’s, and he believes there are some consumers who want the old-fashioned taste.

“In today’s market we are more focused on the consumer than we used to be — it opens new market opportunities,” Stoll says.