Valio butter for better baked goods
The goodness of real, natural butter cannot be substituted in professional baking according to Mika Parviainen, Bakery Consultant at Valio Food Solutions.
Mika Parviainen
Bakery Consultant
Mika works as a bakery consultant. Among his tasks are testing new products and developing appealing recipes for customers. Mika keeps up to date with the current and emerging trends in the bakery and pastry industry
The goodness of real, natural butter cannot be substituted in industrial baking. No plant-based oil or margarine gives pastries and other baked goods the taste and structure that butter does. And to top it all off, butter does it naturally with no E numbers and additives.
As one of the judges in the television show The Great Bake Off: Finland, I have seen how home bakers appreciate the taste and other qualities of butter. There is a huge consumer segment that is not willing to settle for second-best when buying baked goods.
The goodness of real, natural butter cannot be substituted in professional baking according to Mika Parviainen, Bakery Consultant at Valio Food Solutions.
I couldn’t think of any other job than being a Bakery Consultant at Valio. Here I get to work with the best butter in the world!
In industrial baking, the product and process determine what is required of good butter. In puff pastry and other laminated doughs for example, butter needs to have plasticity for flaky and light texture. In shortbread, the taste of the butter plays a significant role. At Valio, we have long experience in manufacturing butter that performs optimally in each bakery application.
As bakery professionals, we all know that the taste of butter in baked goods is inimitable. Butter in itself tastes really good. It gives a rich yet fresh taste to any product.
Butter also carries all other flavours. Whether your product has fruit, berries, vanilla, chocolate or any other ingredient as its core, butter naturally enhances those flavours. You get a rich and aromatic flavour without any E numbers or artificial flavour enhancers.
Butter has a relatively low melting point, which does wonders to the mouthfeel. Valio butter gives the finished product that melt-in-the-mouth effect that any high-quality bakery product should have.
Butter increases short bite in all baked goods. You can make the crumbliest shortcrust pastry and the flakiest puff pastry. Compared to products baked with margarine, those baked with butter have such a fantastic texture and taste that they can be marketed as premium products.
We often hear from our bakery customers that Valio butter is the best product for their croissant dough. That is a great testament to the premium quality and laminating capacity of our butter.
In-store bakeries are increasing all over the world, and consumers are increasingly looking for good quality and wide selection. Manufacturers need to make sure they use ingredients that don’t lose taste or texture when freezed. Valio butter is perfect for products manufactured for in-store bakeries as it provides great texture and aromatic flavour also in frozen bakery products.
It doesn’t take special skill to over-whip cream until it separates and starts forming into butter. But I have never heard of anyone accidentally turning olives into oil or rapeseed into margarine. This alone tells us that butter is an all-natural ingredient. Its manufacturing process doesn’t require any heavy chemicals, for instance.
Valio’s unsalted butter won Best of Class at the World Championship in Wisconsin, USA, on March 2018. There were 30 leading butter brands from around the world participating in the unsalted butter class.
Valio butter is manufactured from fresh and pure Finnish milk. All the milk we use is non- GMO* and has no additives or E numbers. Valio butter is lactic, which gives it a naturally long shelf life without the need for added preservatives or freezing.
Finnish cows are among the healthiest cows in the world. They milk the cleanest milk in the EU. This means that our ingredients have no antibiotics residue or allergen contamination.
We know how important it is for manufacturers to know where their ingredients come from. We also know that consumers want to know what they are eating. Valio butter is a notoriously difficult product to trace because its production employs cream skimmed from a number of different milk batches. That is why we put up a reporting system that enables us to trace the origin of the milk used for a specific batch of butter.
*) ref Reg (EC) No 1829/2003 and No 1830/2003
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