It’s been years now since I’ve had one of these buttermints until I saw a reel from Southern Living on Instagram. It reminded me of these addictive, little pillows, lightly sweetened and spiced with powdered sugar, vanilla, and mint extracts. Last time I was in the grocery store I perused saw only peppermint extract was available. But surely, my mind said, those buttermints from the office weren’t that sharp, unpleasant peppermint. I looked at a few high-end, speciality grocery stores and realized spearmint extract just wasn’t on the shelves. There’s no way this lady bought an obscure extract, right?
It got me thinking too about all I’ve learned in the past years about butter. Butter ain’t just butter. You have varying fat contents in plain American butter versus European butters. There are differences in their fat content, color, and taste. European butter is necessary to get the right texture for croissants. So maybe there’s an effect on something with as few ingredients as buttermints?
And here’s how we came to today, where I decided to do a test on the different butters and the different extracts — grocery store peppermint versus Internet-delivered spearmint. Can you taste the difference in any of the varying factors?
I started off by making two batches, each one using its own mixing bowl and paddle attachment. One had Euro butter as the base, the other had American butter. I left the extract and coloring out at this stage.
Once I had the buttermint “dough” I used my kitchen scale to divide the dough for each into two even amounts. From there I mixed spearmint and food coloring into one of each butter base, then did the same for the peppermint base.
Each dough got kneaded by hand to finish getting the extracts and colorings worked into the dough, plus it helped smooth the dough out. From there, I used a bench scraper to cut the dough into manageable sized pieces to roll into a rope. The bench scraper came in handy again to chop each rope into bite sized pieces.
You can certainly eat the buttermints immediately, I know I helped myself to several of the less pretty ones. But as Patrick pointed out “I remember them a little chalkier tasting.” Well, yes. They do need time to dry a bit, preferable overnight and in a non-humid area.
Spearmint or Peppermint Extract
As a kid I thought peppermints and candy canes were too spicy and avoided them. Peppermint extract can also seem too astringent and spicy to some people. Spearmint extract is more of a cooling mint, like the flavor associated with toothpaste. It doesn’t sting, so that must be the extract used in buttermints.
In a side-by-side comparison, you can only really tell the difference at the tail end of the taste, where the spearmint leaves a slightly cooler effect on the palate. Peppermint leaves a very negligible spice, but again, not enough to even notice.
In the end, I will admit that there’s no discernible difference between the two.
American Butter Versus European Butter
First off, use unsalted butter here. You don’t want salty buttermints.
The higher butterfat content in the European butter I used is the pure Irish butter from Lidl, coming in at 80-82%, which follows standard European butter guidelines and leaves some room for variance.
The Land of the Lakes unsalted butter comes in at 80% butterfat.
I could tell the difference right from unwrapping the butter. Euro butter is much yellower, and leaves a little more greasiness on your fingers to the touch. Then the dough needed more powdered sugar than the recipe called for by about 1/4 to 1/2 of a cup, to overcome the stickiness.
Once again, in the end, the difference between the two butters in this specific recipe is absolutely negligible.
Results of the Buttermint Experiment
Absolutely do make these using the Southern Living buttermint recipe, but don’t go out of your way to get fancy extracts or butters! The most noticeable thing about these other than the way people won’t be able to stop popping these, is the color. So if you want to put your money somewhere with these buttermints, put it into beautiful food colorings that go beyond your red, yellow, green, and blue four-pack in the grocery store baking aisle. Otherwise, save your money and get the butter and mint extract that best fits your budget, because from now on you’re going to be the buttermint bringer to any function you grace these with.
