An artisanal butter from Maine rates raves and kudos

Forget extra virgin olive oils and your exotic buffalo-milk ghees. As the culinary cognoscenti know, artisanal butter may be on the comeback trail - and esteemed by even the fussiest of epicures and gourmets.

The latest evidence? In Old Orchard Beach, Maine, the folks who make Kate's Homemade Butter with Sea Salt happily note that their artisanal product was just named the top pick in New York Magazine's list of best butters.

As an arbiter of taste, New York Magazine wrote: "After having been knocked to the back of the dairy case in the sixties, and buried under a fashionable flood of olive oil in the decades since, butter is back in a big way."

For the record - or at least according to Kate's publicist - Kate's sweet cream butter is made fresh daily in small slow-churned batches using pasteurized cream from cows gloriously ignorant of artificial growth hormones.

No preservatives or additives taint the butter's pristine pedigree, and Kate's founder and president Daniel Patry can trace a butter-churning lineage back four generations.

In a statement, Patry said, "We've all learned that making butter in the same authentic, healthy way that our grandparents and great grandparents did makes all the difference in the world."
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)