“A spoonful of Lurpak is just as enjoyable as a good piece of chocolate”: Meet Denmark’s professional butter tasters

In a temperature-controlled white-walled laboratory in Southern Denmark, four judges dressed in lab coats are silently tasting butter. Here, at Eurofins Laboratories in Brørup, the panel has one peculiar but nonetheless important task: to ensure that this buttery gold has the look, consistency, smell and taste to be deemed worthy of the ‘Lurpak’ stamp. Introduced in 1901, the brand is proof of untampered excellence in butter.

“Ideally, the butter should taste like fresh cream with a hint of salt and a touch of acidity,” says Jakob Pedersen, a dairy technician who, for over 20 years, has been one of only 20 judges on thetasting panel tasked with ensuring that no bad butter makes its way onto the market. Every other week, the panel evaluates 60 samples of Lurpak butter. Only a small nugget doesn’t make the cut. “To properly sample the butter, a good spoonful is needed,” explains Pedersen. “And you must let the butter slowly melt in your mouth, so you can properly evaluate the taste, and how the butter melts.”

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Gorging on 60 spoonfuls of butter in one sitting might not be everyone’s dream job, but two decades on, Pedersen still loves it. “To me, a spoonful of Lurpak is just as enjoyable as a good piece of chocolate,” he says. The Danish obsession with butter goes back a long way. After the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century, falling grain prices put Danish farmers under financial pressure, causing many to switch to butter production.

Unifying in cooperatives, the industrious farmers rapidly turned Danish butter into the lucrative export it remains to this day. In 2019, Denmark exported more than 50,000 tonnes of butter. But this success story wasn’t without its setbacks. The advent of margarine, a much cheaper alternative, threatened to upend the entire industry. In 1885, the so-called ‘Margarine War’ raged on a political level, with right-wing politicians famously propagandising that Denmark should be a ‘clean country’ – as in a country with no margarine.

Both products survived the ‘war’, but Danish butter had enemies greater than different types of spread. The product became so popular that butter from other countries began to be sold as Danish. Enter the ‘Lur Brand’ in 1901, which was soon declared by law a national brand for all Danish butter exports. The brand signified which butter was, indeed, the real Danish deal.

Since then, only butter of the highest quality has been deemed worthy by the jury. The butter is graded on a scale from one to 15 based on look and consistency. To get the stamp, no butter should score under nine, but the average score is 13. The judges must also be on top of their game. If a taster’s scores deviate just half a point from the panel’s averages, the taster must undergo a test to prove that they are still qualified to remain on the panel. If the test is not satisfactory, their days of judging butter are over.

So yes, butter is both big business and a big deal. Not least for Danish chefs. The ‘sourdough revolution’ of the last decade has emphasised the importance of serving great bread and butter to preempt a great meal. A few years ago, many chefs would go out of their way to churn their own butter, adding buttermilk or wild garlic to create a signature flavour. Nowadays, that focus seems to have shifted, says Daniel McBurnie, head chef at Lyst, a Michelin-starred restaurant at Fjordenhus in Vejle.

The restaurant’s spectacular venue, designed by artist Olafur Eliasson, doubles as a domicile for Kirk Kapital, the family behind LEGO. “When it comes to butter, we like to let other craftspeople do what they do best,” says McBurnie. Keeping with Lyst’s penchant for exceptional local products, McBurnie has teamed up with local dairy Lindved Mejeri to create a special extra-salted butter, containing a whopping 3.5 per cent Læsø sea salt for the restaurant’s signature bread serving.

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The presentation is as simple as it is decadent. A square piece of sourdough bread is served with an 8-millimetre-thick slice of butter. On the side, a glass of Krug Grande Cuvée Champagne is poured. Expensive and opulent, the Champagne mirrors the taste of both the bread and butter. “We wanted to do a serving that highlights the product and gives both the bread and butter the respect it deserves,” says McBurnie. “It’s humble and arrogant at the same time.”

At Lyst, respecting the butter means serving it in generous amounts. The slice is so thick that your teeth leave an imprint. There’s even a word for that in Danish: tandsmør – literally ‘tooth butter’. It’s considered an adequate amount of butter on the morning roll. Meanwhile, at Brace in Copenhagen, chef Nicola Fanetti has his own take on the product, evident at first glance. Using an organic extra-salted butter from Thise mixed with blackcurrant powder, he has created an extraordinary, pinkish concoction with a richness and fruity acidity. “The blackcurrant accentuates the acidity in a way that plain butter can’t. It elevates the whole serving completely,” he says. "I don’t think I’ll ever change it.”

Being Italian, you’d think that Fanetti would be all about olive oil. But he is from the northern part of the country, where butter still reigns supreme. “It’s in my blood,” says Fanetti. Growing up in a rural village in mountainous Lombardy, he remembers how butter-making was a convivial event in the community, with families hand- churning and embossing their butter with the family seal.Alongside his pretty pink butter, he’s serving up a mix of Sicilian sfincione and focaccia. The dough is proofed for 48 hours and baked and glazed with maple syrup and sea salt. The bottom is dusted with powdered rosemary, resulting in a sweet and salty companion.

A hundred years ago, in the heydays of Danish butter, Denmark had more than 1,000 cooperative dairies. Today, butter is a centralised affair. Lindved Mejeri is one of very few independent dairies remaining. Another is Aabybro Mejeri in the north of Jutland, where butter has been churned out since 1888. On these premises, the product is made the old-school way.

While large-scale production churns butter with fresh cream, adding an acidifier afterwards, Aabybro takes the slow route to great taste. The cream is soured for 12-15 hours, cooled and left to rest for another six hours before being churned in a trusty old butter churn from 1958. Finally, it’s seasoned with Læsø sea salt. The slow process allows for development of taste and a refreshing acidic kick, along with all the little imperfections of hand making.

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“This butter would never get a high grade at the Lurpak judging. There’s water on the surface, it is uneven, and it has little lumps here and there,” says Niels Henrik Lindhardt, whose family has owned the dairy since 1968. However, the taste is flawless. Top chefs swear by Lindhardt’s award-winning butter. Among them is Eric Vildgaard of two Michelin-starred Jordnær in the Copenhagen suburb of Gentofte. “We think it’s the world’s best butter,” he says. “I’ve had dairy people admitting that they cannot emulate the taste of it. It must be something in the air up there.”

As a homage to the great butter, Vildgaard’s right-hand man Mads Olesen has spent one and a half years developing a special brioche bread with as much of the Aabybro butter crammed into it as possible. “It shouldn’t be physically possible, but Mads has basically made butter with a crust,” Vildgaard says of the bread, which is made with two parts flour, one part egg and one part butter. After coming out of the oven, the bread is given a quick soak in herbed Sardinian goat’s butter and herbed syrup, before being presented to the guests midway through the menu, with Aabybro butter on the side, naturally.

The serving is an unadulterated indulgence; crusty at first bite, followed by a wave of melting butter. “We used to do sourdough bread, but as our kitchen developed into something more refined, smooth and elegant, we think the sensory nature of this bread is a much better fit,” says Vildgaard. It’s hardly a healthy snack, but part of butter ’s charm is its unapologetic decadence . As Mads Olesen says of his over-the-top concoction: “The healthy alternative would be a chocolate croissant.”