The Best Butter is from… Iceland?

When we starting making Southern-style buttermilk biscuits for brunch last year, we really started to appreciate the importance of good butter for slathering on a fresh biscuit. The grocery store varieties wouldn’t do – so we needed an upgrade. We started out buying Chimay Belgian salted butter from the grocery store we loved in Chicago, Fresh Farms. However, we couldn’t find it in Cleveland, so we switched unsuccessfully to salted Amish butter roll butter (too pale) and more successfully to Trader Joe’s cultured French butter (pretty good, especially for the price), which tasted similar to Chimay. However, when our last stick from TJ’s ran out we decided to do some sleuthing. Could we do any better? There were many fans of Kerrygold, the Irish butter, but some expressed dismay that the cows’ diets were being changed from grass-only.

One name that seemed to rise to the top in discussions of butter was Smjör – an Icelandic butter that contains milk from 100% grass-fed cows. We found Smjör at Whole Foods and it was about the same price ($4.99) as a regular box of Land O’Lakes butter, which was a happy surprise. We tried out Smjör on our latest batch of biscuits, and we can attest that it is as delicious as its reputation! The butter had an appealing, bright yellow color and was smooth and spreadable, instead of flaky as butter can sometimes be. There was a hint of salt, but it was not overpowering. Overall, the taste was really clean and buttery – butter as it was meant to be! You can also get unsalted Smjör at Whole Foods, which may be good for baking. The quality was much greater than the typical grocery store brands, and the price was not much more, so there’s no reason not to stock up. I think we have found our new go-to fancy butter!