This screamed out at me from the cold case of my favorite cheese monger on Saturday. It is a genuine Loire import, "Celle sur Belle", and it's exactly what you French-speakers understand from the title: salted butter, but not salted in the conventional manner. Rather than dissolved and mixed throughout, the salt in this heavenly stuff is large crystals.
This may be the ultimate butter for spreading on good bread. Oops, not spread, it's more like caked. I like cold butter on hot bread if I'm going to indulge in bread and butter, and to make sure I didn't decapitate any of the crunchy crystals I dipped my knife into the little wooden bucket and cut a goodly swath which I placed more or less in the middle of the bread slice such that some bites had no butter, some had a little, and some had a lot. The butter wasn't everywhere but where it was, it was thick.
Delicious butter with that tangy, distinctly European taste. Not cheap at $6.99 for about half a pound, but for anyone to whom good butter is an ultimate condiment, what a treat.
