Polish Salted Butter

Hi not being Polish but trying to learn all about the Polish cuisine.

There is a small Polish shop right next to me and i love going in there and getting different slices of meat i also bought some butter but i don't think it's a salted variety as it does not taste like the butters i usually get.

Is there any specific butters that are like the salted butters i am used to ie lurpak or salted Scottish butter. Thx in advance

It exists in bigger shops (though only in bigger shops) in Poland. President (the company that makes Polish fake Camembert) do a salted version. If your shop has it, which it probably won't since there's plenty of salted butter for sale in the U.K. in ordinary shops, it will be labelled as "solone masło".

In general, Polish butter from shops is unsalted. If it's made at home, people often salt it so it keeps longer.

The only reason for buying butter in a Polish shop (it's all factory made, just the same as anywhere else) is if you want 'ekstra masło', the concentrated kind that has a nice buttery taste due to being clarified and made from anhydrous milk fat. It's good for tasting and the flavour is nice. It should be labelled clearly as 'ekstra masło'. Mlekovita is a good brand. as is Osełka.

Osełka means butter pat rather than a brand. It isn't patted traditionally with butter pats any more, however there's a slight difference in the manufacturing process that people like. It's usually not been clarified.

Many thx for the reply

It's a pleasure. Please excuse the typos (I meant 'cooking' rather than 'tasting').

A quick question. You mentioned Scottish butter and I wondered if it's different from English or Irish. If it is, I'll try some.

The best I've had was some from France (Normandy possibly) that someone had brought to Poland. Usually, I buy Polish Ekstra Masło because of the taste. It's unsalted, but very very buttery.

We also make home made in the food processor which is nicer than shop bought, but only as good as the cream used.

In Poland, there are a few 'foodie markets' where small producers sell cheese etc. Sometimes they have butter made from cream that's gone slightly off and it is excellent. I doubt it would be found in Polish shops abroad though.

Being Scottish i might be slightly biased but i do think Scottish Salted Butter is best but Irish is pretty good as well.

Being Irish, I must disagree :)


How very dare you! Irish is the best butter in the world bar none :) Because of the pastures on which Irish cows are raised and the fact that they graze outdoors all year round, the butter is tastier and more nutritious. I imagine it's similar in Scotland?

Polish dairy produce is not the best, the milk here is like water compared to Irish.

Except for Yorkshire butter, of course.

Being an American with many choices to choose from, I would have to say that nothing comes close to being as good as Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter.

At most second.... once Biedronka had Portuguese butter from the Azores.... and it was soooooooo goood I kept being tempted to eat it on its own... I keep looking for it.

IME I'd tie Irish and Danish butter after that.

Polish butter... it's actually better now... I remember in the early 90s you couldn't even find butter it was all margarine..

I'm not sure if Poland's always been weak on dairy products or if communism wrecked it the way it wrecks everything else. In a lot of ways dairy production for anything but sour milk products (or fresh twaróg that was good as was fresh cream when you could find it) is still in its infancy.

IME milk in the Czech republic is worse.

Of course!


The unmitigated cheek of you!

I'd like to taste that Portuguese stuff and see how it compares to Irish.

I'm sure any butter produced by a small artisan dairy/creamery in the UK would be very good. I wonder what butter is like from Guernsey or Jersey cows raised in the Channel Islands. It's really the cows' diet that determines the taste.

Nearly all product from Jersey cows is sold as milk and cream. The cream has a very high fat content so would make butter easily however the 'clean' taste of Jersey cream might count against it since with butter as with cheese, the more character (I.e. impurities, bacteria, quirky natural chemicals) the milk or cream has, the better the end product.

You'll be sure to tell me "Obrigada!"

free range cows eating grass (flavored by the sea air)...

youtube.com/watch?v=Yu5MdNfCMh4

youtube.com/watch?v=Eqmba-M0Cxw

Lovely images Maf. And here's exactly the same thing from Ireland :)) I would argue that the soil along the Irish coastline is even better than Portugal.

Irish grass-fed beef won more medals than any other country in the 2018 and 2019 World Steak Challenge. In the 2019 contest, with competitors from 25 countries including Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, USA, Canada and Europe, Ireland won a record 75 medals, more than any other competing country, including the World's Best Fillet. :))

youtube.com/watch?v=Ee8VCUDbkFg

Cows are actually lovely animals to spend time around. When I lived in the Wicklow mountains in Ireland, there were cows in the field directly across the road from our house and they were really relaxing to watch! I also love sheep :) They were in the field behind the house. Irish cows don't seem to mind the rain at all. They just graze quite happily even in a downpour.

Probably true, but it's also probably true that the Azores gets more sunshine than Ireland (being at the same latitude as southern mainland Portugal).

The temperament of cows depends a lot on the breed. Holsteins seem to be very laid back.... the cows my rancher cousin had were of the scrub variety and standoffish or downright ornery.

An interesting contribution to Irish culinary traditions comes from the Middle Ages and can be found in the book: "Vikings. A Concise History of the Vikings":

According to Irish accounts, after the battle [fought in Ireland] messangers of the King of Ireland came to the Danes to congratulate them on their victory over the Norwegian vikings, only to be horrified by the Danish vikings in full celebrations with vast cauldrons of meat being boiled over the dead bodies of the vanquished Norwegian vikings. The messangers immediately cried out in horror that the Danes "should not do such things", but such acts were an enshrined custom of victory over a vanquished enemy, and the Danes simply informed the Irish that the Norwegians would have done the same to them had they been the luckier part of the battle.

Dochreidte an t-am a bhí sna Meánaoiseanna in Éirinn!

Who among us hasn't?

Ireland has long exported butter and cheese to Britain. It's a country of 3 million people with a lot of dairy cows. Next to a country of 60 million with plenty of cows but not enough. Making butter and salting it for preservation is a good way of exporting it without wastage. They make a lot of cheese too, a lot of it generic cheddar for the U.K. market, some (that doesn't get exported as much) is more traditional. If you ever see Cashel Blue, buy some. It's dear but worth it.

The product of English (and Scottish) dairy cows generally goes to be sold as milk and cream, most of it fresh (pasteurised rather than UHT). It's particularly good quality. I've heard Americans who are in Britain saying that what they'll miss when they leave is the dairy products.

Plenty of cheese in Britain. General DeGaulle once said that it's impossible to govern a country with 200 types of cheese. The U.K. has around 850.

I wonder how much sunshine actually affects the quality of pasture though. Ironically it's the combination of damp and mild temperatures that make Irish pasture so nutritious.


I'm always telling everyone how great the Irish are and now you can see I was right :)) We'd never boil our enemies!

You lose so many nutrients that way... roasting is clearly the better option.


Sunny sea air is the greatest substance on the planet...

I remember my first encounter with salted butter in 1980s. It was butter sent to communist Poland in charity transports from Western countries, in our case it was Norway. I quite liked it as some kind of novelty. Later I have never had it.

Weird.... get some Irish (real Irish not phony Polish-Irish) or Danish salted butter (or from the Azores if you're lucky).

Why isn't Polish butter better? I mean it's better than it used to be... but... hmmmm

Not so much. I stopped using butter a dozen or two years ago. :):)

You need to stop worrying so much and live a little.....life without butter? Pfa!

No, thanks, a few months ago I became salt aware and have tried to cut down on it since then. With poor results - I can`t give up some favourite salty stuff like roquefort etc.


It is high time we started worrying before it is too late. :):)


I use olive oil instead and never regretted dropping butter. The only exception is butter in my fish egg sandwiches.

The absolutely best butter I know is the PLUGRA Extra Creamy butter (of course the unsalted version) which can be found in many (but not all) US grocery stores. They used to label it "European style," but not any longer. Now it's "Real Milk From American Dairy Farms." It's probably similar to the Polish Masło Extra, which, at least in the olden times, was a fresh butter (in contrast to the regular butter which was stored frozen for an extended time, like all regular American grocery store butters). Of course the price of the Extra was somewhat higher than that of the regular butter.

Being a butter junkie, I tried all the butters easily available to me, including Polish Osełka etc., Irish, Scottish, French, and what not. Nothing comes close to PLUGRA. The PLUGRA tastes fresh, aromatic, creamy and slightly sour, without any "pure tasteless fat" impression and without any trace of translucency to it, exactly the way I like it. Nothing else that I can find daily in US stores comes close.

Why do you write the name in capital letters? Looks like a paid SEO post. As for nothing comes close, we all have our preferences and maybe it suits your palate best, but you can't dismiss all the other high quality butters in the world in that fashion.

Oh, yes I can dismiss alright! I actually already did it - I dismissed, dumped, and released from duty all the other butters in the world, including the famous yak butter that's used for making wonderful huge sculptures around the Tibet. This is my opinion, not an executive order (EO), which I hope is obvious on a forum. I don't have to say "in my opinion" in every sentence, because everything I say here is but my opinion. I will not engage in any public second guessing of my personal taste for butter! It is what it is and I merely disclose my choice for anyone curious, without any obligation to explain on my part or to be fair to other butters. I like that butter more than any other. Also the choice of capitalizing a brand name is mine. Disclaimer: I'm not in any way associated with dairy business or dairy product placement or advertising. I declare no competing monetary interest in butter sales.

Nevertheless, I do wish more people discovered PLUGRA, because otherwise they might stop offering it. It is a niche product now. It does not match the butter preferences of an average American. I have seen many great products disappear over time from the mainstream (big and cheap) grocery stores, because they were not popular enough to sell in mass quantities.

Oh, wee see. So you only intended to express your utter fascination with it


That`s quite a plausible reason for your promoting it.


Now we believe you. You are excused and free to go wherever you want. You can also stay here.

You can't possibly have tasted all of them :)

Btw SEO means search engine optimization, nothing to do with 'executive orders'.


I don't think the average American knows much about good quality food and in particular dairy produce. I can tell from your English that you're not a native speaker so I assume you have the misfortune to live in the USA through choice rather than having the bad luck of being born there :)) American farming methods are diabastrous as we'd say in Dublin (that's Dublin, Ireland btw, not Dublin, Ohio or wherever it is in the USA).

No, I also haven't tried every religion in the world before dismissing most of them. There is nothing derogatory about dismissing. It's just that life is too short. No offense to KerryGold.


Yeah, I figured that out, and that's why I gave you the disclaimers. Go figure, the EO - SEO parallel was purely accidental. EO was my political allusion. EO's are so common today all over the world, but that's not how I operate. I don't impose my butter on anyone.


It's a Big Country. I guess even Scotland or Ireland are each a Big Country in a sense. "Average" is a useful notion in statistics, but it doesn't start to describe anything. Farming methods in Wisconsin may be horrendous, still they managed to make my favorite butter.

But I can live and breathe
And see the sun in wintertime
In a Big Country dreams stay with you
Like a lover's voice fires the mountainside
Stay alive.

I thought about salted butter and concluded it is harmful coz too many foods contain too much salt which is called white death by some dieticians.


It used to be a miserable place to live under former Presidency but now they are up for a revival with the new government.