Hotel Bar brand butter; per 14g, 11g fat (of which 2.5g is saturated fat and 2.5g is trans fat)
Finlandia brand butter; per 14g, 11g fat (of which 6g is saturated fat and none is trans fast)
Land O’Lakes brand butter; per 14g, 11g fat (of which 7g is saturated fat and none is trans fat)
Differences in composition are about more than just a couple of % more or less fat by weight. The texture and taste of Hotel Bar butter is quite different from that of Land O’Lakes, etc.
We’ll put our eggbeater in the dishwasher. It’s stainless steel and it seems fine.
The eggbeater in the image you use in your post appears to have wooden parts (the handle).
needing to get the hand mixer out and assemble it
Well, where you store your hand mixer is obviously up to you; if you use it often, keep it in a convenient place—just as with the eggbeater. As for assembly, it takes mere seconds.
A wire whisk is easier to wash. You can put it in your dishwasher, for example, or fully immerse it to soak, etc., without worrying about water damage to any components.
EDIT: But yes, the way I described is definitely slower than using an eggbeater. My actual preferred solution for making whipped cream is to use an electric hand mixer, which is faster than either manual option.
You can keep butter in your fridge for weeks and it will stay fresh enough to use. (If you’re fussy you can scrape off a thin layer of slightly-oxidized butter from the surface.) You can’t do that with cream.
Yes, you absolutely can do this with cream. Cream doesn’t go bad for quite some time—it can easily keep for 2 or 3 weeks, even longer. (In fact, I have never seen cream go bad—though I haven’t deliberately tested it, the point is that your cream accidentally going bad is very unlikely.)
Note, however, that in the case of cobbler or pie, you can reduce the sugar in the dessert itself, compensate partly by sweetening your whipped cream, and thereby achieve both a reduction in total sugar content, and a more complex flavor profile.
But there’s rarely any advantage to fancy butter in baking either
Indeed there is; the difference is not primarily the flavor, but the composition.
True enough!
Your first comment implied that it’s the annoyance of cleaning the eggbeater, specifically, that was problematic; hence my reply. (Your actual concern is clear now, of course, though my suggestion may perhaps still benefit others.)
The supermarket sells various kinds of fancy butter, but why don’t people eat whipped cream instead … I’m sure I’m missing something
In addition to what has been already said, another thing you’re missing is that butter isn’t only used by simply eating it; it’s also used in cooking and baking. In the latter case especially, the whey in the cream will ruin almost any recipe where you attempt a direct substitution of whipped cream for butter.
Cream still has some whey in it, and whipping it just suspends it, where fully churning or overwhipping it separates it out so the remainder is purer fat
One interesting thing you can do in order to separate the whey from the fat in cream is (something very much like) freeze-distillation.
There is a cold spot in my refrigerator (not the freezer!) where the ambient temperature is approximately 25 °F. If I put a carton of heavy cream there, in several days the contents will have largely separated—there will be a solid chunk of milkfat, and some liquid whey.
Having drained the whey, I can then beat the milkfat with an electric mixer. This causes the remainder of the whey to separate out (due to centrifugal force); after draining this remnant whey, I am left with butter.
The advice in this post is based on very flawed assumptions, but if you’re inclined to take it anyway (or to do something else in this vein), then note that there’s an easier way than using such a complex contraption as an eggbeater.
You will need the following:
Pour no more than 3⁄4 cup cream into Pyrex measuring cup. Hold whisk vertically, with its business end fully immersed in the cream, and with the handle between the palms of your hands. Move your hands back and forth vigorously, so as to roll the whisk between your palms.
This will whip the cream, in relatively short order (though not as quickly as if you used an electric hand mixer).
Alternatively, maybe people think whipped cream has to have sugar in it? This one is simple: whipped cream should not have sugar in it. If you’re eating whipped cream on something sweet it doesn’t need sugar because the other thing is sweet, while if you’re having it on something savory it doesn’t need sugar because that would taste funny.
This is false. You forgot about an entire basic flavor: sour.
Obvious counterexample to your claim: whipped cream on berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, etc.). Do the berries taste sweet? No, not really (even the sweeter cultivars / crops don’t contain enough sugar to be “dessert”-level sweet). Are the berries “savory”? No. Does sweet whipped cream “taste funny” on berries? No, it tastes exactly perfect.
(Other examples in the same vein: Key lime pie; blueberry/peach cobbler—recall that it’s usually served with either sweetened whipped cream or vanilla ice cream—which is certainly sweet.)
… the situation was so disheartening that in my memory of it I mentally substituted something more palatable!
(Fixed, thanks.)
This phenomenon is very familiar to me as a UX designer, because it often makes bugs or design flaws way, way more difficult to learn about than should (one would naively imagine) be the case.
Specifically: suppose I release some piece of software, which has some bug, or usability flaw, etc.; and suppose this problem does not manifest for me, in my own testing, but does manifest for many other users, on a regular basis. One might expect that a flood of complaints, bug reports, angry tweets, irate emails, etc., would nigh-instantly alert me to the problem’s existence… but instead there is naught but silence, and I remain blissfully unaware that there’s anything wrong.
Then some time passes, and—by sheer accident!—I discover that large numbers of users have been living with this problem for weeks or months or (horror!) years, and just haven’t said anything… because they’re used to technology just… not working very well, or having bugs, etc.; and so they shrug and treat it as “one of those things”, and do some workaround, or just tolerate the problem, and never consider that, actually, there is something wrong with this picture, and that it is possible for this problem (indeed, most such problems) to not exist, and that complaining might yield results.
As they say—many such cases! (Here, for example, is gwern tweeting about a case when a website he built had 460,000 unique visitors before word got to him before he realized, after checking personally, that the layout was broken on mobile devices!)
EDIT: Corrected the gwern anecdote—it was even worse than I remembered.
A relevant old comment of mine. (Dagon’s point is similar to half of what I say there.)
EDIT: This other old comment is also relevant.
Are you saying that you, personally, were confused about whether Zvi (or Scott) does, or does not, support slavery? Is that actually something that you were unsure whether you had understood properly?
That was excellent, and I quite enjoyed watching it. I’m not going to spoil it for anyone who’s not seen yet, of course, but I just want to say:
Well done, Eliezer!
I agree with this, based on my experience.
At least one reason for it seems straightforward, though. Whether something is important is a judgment that you have to make, and it’s not an easy one; it’s certainly not obvious what things are important, and you can’t ever be totally certain that you’ve judged importance correctly (and importance of things can change over time, etc.). On the other hand, whether something is interesting (to you!) is just a fact, available to you directly; it’s possible to deceive yourself about whether something’s interesting to you, but not easy… certainly the default is that you just know whether you find something interesting or not.
In other words, self-deception about what’s important is just structurally much more likely than self-deception about what’s interesting.
I am fairly sure it’s criticism (and I agree with it).
PmWiki has these features.
Hotel Bar is a cheap brand.