Stupid Guest Tricks

Be glad you have REAL BUTTER at the WDW employee cafeteria. In the Knott's employee cafeteria (Crew's Nest aka Four Cornerstone Cafe) we almost never have butter. We usually have this cheap margarine/butter blend. It's oily and doesn't have a lot of flavor. :( Then again, this is Knott's and how can I expect anything better?

My mom swears she can taste when butter has been left out. I guess it has a slight acidic rancid taste? So the butter stays cold at our house. Although i'll take it any which way. As long as it tastes good and fresh.

I was taught to leave butter cold, though. If for anything for quality and freshness. If you want it soft, leaving it out ontop or near the oven is okay ,but only for 6 hours tops. After that it either becomes way to soft or is on the danger side for pathogens to grow. Even with pasteurizing i think without a decent acidic level it'll still have bacteria grow to dangerous levels. But maybe i'm just over analyzing since many people have lived on ,and still do, butter sitting out. Lol

My understanding is that pasteurizing does contribute to making the butter fat go rancid slower.

Although, also, i think pasteurizing might be harsh enough that it might get rid of alot of the natural enzymes in the milk that can help with keeping it 'safe'. Though that's pure speculation, not fact.

It'd be interesting to research more. I think dairy is such a complex subject in itself there should be scientists dedicated to the stuff. Lol

felinefan wrote:Lehman's has the ancient butter crocks too: http://www.lehmans.com . Mom's from Pennsylvania, and we leave our butter out for days, even in hot weather. It may melt, but we've never gotten sick from it. Zazu is right--pasteurization makes the difference. The only time we have butter in the fridge is if it melted on a hot day, we just stick it back in the fridge to harden. Or in the fridge door if it's not ready to be used. In the freezer if we just bought a big box of it at Costco.

Margarine isn't that good for you anyway--studies have shown that margarine is more likely to cause heart disease than butter, because butter is made of cream, which is natural, vs. margarine, which is made of vegetable oils, which actually are not that heart-healthy. People have been eating butter for thousands of years, margarine's only been around less than 100 years. Funny how heart disease as a major cause of death started around the same time as the popularization of margarine, among other things. A hundred years ago the number one cause of death was pneumonia.

I totally agree that many margarines are less healthy than butter, although I think that that is changing and I doubt that unprocessed or lightly processed foods have any inherent health advantage over processed foods. I think that as our knowledge of the way the human body works chemically increases that processed foods will eventually become more healthy than "natural" foods. However, I don't know if they will become more palatable, and since natural foods are definitely adequately healthy I think that I will be eating butter for a long time! Nobody has yet come out with a margarine that has both the taste and buttery feel melted that batter has. I have found a few that have the taste pretty much down, but melted they are all pretty disgusting to me. I do use margarine for buttering bread (at other people's houses and restaurants since I don't buy the stuff), but I would never but it on toast, steak, or sausage!

I think the rise of heart disease (and cancer and other non-infectious diseases) as a percentage of deaths has a lot more to do with the decline of infectious disease than with dietary or environmental changes; but I think heart disease and cancer striking young people is definitely increased by modern society. Still, even with those increases we still have a much longer average lifetime than they did back then.

-Harry

PS This year is margarine's 150th birthday. By 128 years ago margarine had become so popular that the butter lobby pressured some state (New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and New Hampshire) legislatures to require pink coloring to be added so that people would be less likely to buy it. The Supreme Court overturned the pink color laws, but it was still illegal to make it yellow in many states until the 1960's. From the 1880s until the 1960's margarine would sometimes be sold with little yellow food dye capsules so that people could make it yellow themselves after they bought it. Just some facts I found while last night putting around the internet trying to find out exactly how long butter will stay good out of the fridge (the real answer not the health department answer.) Incidentally, the consensus is that it will usually keep for several weeks and will turn rancid long before it goes bad. One exception is if you get bread crumbs on it it will sometimes pick up the bread mold which I presume most people would throw away (I know I would).

We always kept our sticks of butter in the fridge. Butter came out to soften for meals and went right back in after.

Small pats of packaged butter can be quickly softened by gently squeezing between both palms.
Even rock-hard pats should soften in about 15 seconds this way.

Near Philly wrote:We always kept our sticks of butter in the fridge. Butter came out to soften for meals and went right back in after.

Small pats of packaged butter can be quickly softened by gently squeezing between both palms.
Even rock-hard pats should soften in about 15 seconds this way.

...If only there was a way to convert all that heat into electrical energy, we could power our computers....

Hmmmmmmmm...

..I have seen that somewhere else......

hehehehehe

HarryFromMarydelDE wrote:Although I think I have heard that bread mold can be good for you too, but that is a research project for another day.

OKAY, did some more research while waiting for my sister to come over for her birthday. There are many different kinds of bread molds, and some are good for you. However, others are very infectious, especially for people with respiratory problems. Respiratory fungal infections can be very hard to cure. DO NOT EAT BREAD MOLD. I'm also deleting the bread mold can be good for you statement from my last message.

-Harry

PS OKAY, the message was too old to edit. Just don't eat bread mold. [Original post edited as requested --Mod.]

HarryFromMarydelDE wrote: PS This year is margarine's 150th birthday.

February 14, 2009 is also the 150th anniversary of the State of Oregon. Happy Birthday Oregon! (Wallaby, I bet you didn't know that.)

By the way, my Mom (in Oregon) always left a stick of butter or margarine in a dish in the cupboard until it was gone, which didn't take long in a family of 6.
We use the tubbed margarines now and keep them in the frig.

I tried to reply, but got a message saying I had to follow posting rules. Can anyone tell me what is going on please? I wasn't spamming anyone; I just said how my mom remembers the colored margarine, and how when people of means in her town had clambakes during World War II, they got rationed butter on the black market, and mom and her siblings would swipe it. Mom's family was so poor, they often had to carry margarine sandwiches to school. Grandma had to let the margarine sit out overnight to soften it for coloring the next day. Without color it looked like Crisco.

The words "Forum Rules" is showing in green; I've never seen it do that before. Is this thing picking up on certain words and deciding that I'm allegedly spamming? Because when I tried to post before, the sentence "Spamming/ attacking another poster" was checked and in red.

felinefan wrote:I just said how my mom remembers the colored margarine, and how when people of means in her town had clambakes during World War II, they got rationed butter on the black market, and mom and her siblings would swipe it. Mom's family was so poor, they often had to carry margarine sandwiches to school. Grandma had to let the margarine sit out overnight to soften it for coloring the next day. Without color it looked like Crisco.

Strangely, margarine can be somewhat palatable cold but is disgusting melted, while Crisco is disgusting cold but once melted can be used as an ingredient in some very tasty things. Of course, they are both different combinations and preparations of vegetable oils, so they are probably very similar chemically I guess.

This is totally unrelated, but Crisco can be used as a replacement for tallow, which made me think of candles which made me think of those little wax bottles we used to have that had flavored water in them. You could bite off the end and drink the water or you could just chew the whole bottle like some sort of astoundingly low quality chewing gum. Does anybody remember these and know if they are still around? I used to love those things.

-Harry

wow - I never seen anyone get so worked up over butter.
Just as much as you complain about it being being cold, I know that others would complain endlessly if it were kept out in the open. "It may get germs - bacteria ... blah blah wah wah ... how unsanitary!" And so on.

We always keep butter in the fridge until we need it. Some times it's out over night, others it's not. If ya want it soft,then take a pat and mush it up a bit until it gets soft. Really, it does not take long.