Everyday Sommelier: Salted butter

St Helen’s Farm goats butter £3.15 (250g), ocado.com; sthelensfarm.co.uk

Perhaps you, non-follower of dairy trends, think: surely it is always having a moment? Or moments, even: on toast, in sandwiches, for baking, finishing sauces etc. But there’s a bit more to it than that.

In recent times, it’s been a publishing sensation (we’re all still eating rice with butter and soy sauce, right?). It was the colour of last summer and has even been a winter scarf, a hair claw and an excellent jumper.

Butter-flavoured crisps rocked our world and at the end of summer in New York, when Dominique Ansel, the man who gave us the cronut, dipped a cone of soft-serve ice-cream in melted French butter and sprinkled it with sea salt, social media was ignited – you can now find a version of his recipe in Camden.

Butter has also moved into the “affordable luxury” category. The price of supermarket butters has noticeably jumped over the past few years. Add to this an increase in the availability of excellent and interesting butters made in the UK, we’re more likely to splash out on a more premium product.

There’s a whole rising category of “flavoured” butters, which perhaps we’ll look at another time (basically, we’d rather make our own), but our first love – and the better product – remains salted. Here are the ones we like best.

Available in most supermarkets, this is a step up from most standard blocks. Don’t worry about it being “goaty” – it’s mild and sweetly nutty, like the milky flesh of raw almonds. (The sweetness is also probably due to it being fractionally lower in salt than many other supermarket butters.)

M&S Collection’s farmhouse goat’s butter is also worth trying.

Fun fact: goat’s butter is naturally white, but producers colour it, so as not to weird out consumers. Try Quicke’s version (£8, 250g), if you want to see a pure-white version. It’s made with whey butter, a by-product from the cheese they produce, and has a fresh but rich, fuller and, yes, slightly goat-cheesy (in a gorgeous way) taste.

Estate Dairy cultured butter from £3.50 (250g), theestatedairy.com; ocado.com

If you always reach for the cylindrical butters from Brittany or Normandy, here is a local version. Some of our favourite bakers use Estate’s cultured butter in their viennesorie, but you can buy this excellent product in several supermarkets for less than a (central-London-priced) croissant. The Cheshire dairy adds their creme fraiche (featuring a Lactobacillus culture) to their cream then lets it age for nearly three days before churning.

Appleby’s whey butter from £5 (250g), applebysdairy.com

Cheshire cheese is the UK’s oldest style, and for generations the Appleby family have made it in a traditional way – one of the only farmhouse dairies left. The whey, a by-product of the cheese, is turned into this glorious golden, mellow but distinctive butter – somewhat rustic in flavour and texture. The Applebys suggest spreading it thick enough that you see bite marks. It is delicious enough to do just that. (If you can find it, the butter Keens make from their cheddar byproduct is also excellent.)

Bungay raw cultured butter £7.95 (200g), fenfarmdairy.co.uk

The UK’s only raw-milk cultured farmhouse butter is made by hand in Suffolk. The cream is soured then churned and paddled with wooden butter “hands”. With a fresher tang than the butters above, it’s gorgeous and silky, complex and slightly floral.

Clotted cream butter

“Is this good?” we once asked, in a deli. “It’s butter. Made with clotted cream.” The withering “obviously” was indicated with a look, rather than words. Big, almost unnecessarily rich, hard to find, hard to beat – the final boss of artisan UK butter. Coombeshead Farm does a version on occasion (order a couple of packs, because the delivery is likely to cost more than the butter). Ivy House Farm also has a version – available from them, or occasionally a deli.

Illustration by Charlotte Durance