Why homemade and certain artisan commercial butters have creamy texture but most commercial butters have oily texture?

Question

Usually when you make homemade butter, and sometimes some commercial semi-artisan butters, for example french Isigny Ste-Mère Unpasteurised, the butter has a, what I would call "creamy" texture. I realized its not what others consider creamy, but I lack a better word at the moment. Think ice-cream creamy not face-cream creamy. Seems almost like very thick cream (but also not talking about the liquid homogenized stuff sold as cream in supermarkets, but real cream you get when you let milk from a cow you just milked yourself stand and cream collects on the top). The butter has a kind-of ice-cream texture, but without the need to keep it cold, and you can cut it up with a knife and eat like pieces of some cheese and it feels tasty.

But most typical butters from the supermarket have none of that, and feel like a totally different product. Has a very oily texture, not much creaminess, and if you try to eat it like cheese it tastes almost disgusting, unpalatable. It seems more like semi-solid oil. Even higher quality butters like Irish Kerrygold which is touted as grass-fed, is very oily, actually its more oily then other commercial butters.

I also have the impression that the homemade creamy butter melts at a higher temperature then typical commercial butter, which would be already melting and not keeping its cube shape at a hot-day room temperature without aircon (~26-30°C, ~80-90°F) but the homemade butter would still stay pretty solid.

I am not talking about fake butters with vegetable oils added in, all of these butters are pure cow milk butters with 82% fat, nothing added.

What exactly in the process makes the difference in the result?

I don't think it's the pasteurization, as I've seen butter from unpasteurized milk which was also oily and not creamy, certainly much more oily then other butters I've seen. There seems to be a varying degree of oiliness vs. creaminess among various commercial and homemade butters, it's a spectrum, not a all-or-nothing thing. Some commercial butters feel less oily and more creamy then others.

Answer 1

While I am not completely sure what texture difference you are seeing, and I would not necessarily describe store-bought butter as 'oily', I can think of a reason why the texture of homemade butter is different: air. Depending on your method, when churning butter at home, you usually incorporate some air into the butter, giving it a 'fluffier' texture. This is similar to (but less extreme than) whipped butter.

A simple test to see if this is indeed the case would be to take some store-bought butter, follow the recipe I linked to above, and see whether the result is closer to your preferred texture.

Answer 2

I will make a guess in light of the new information.

If the quality that interests you is being similar to the cream collecting on top of raw milk, then the process difference here is underchurning. Cream is just an intermediate stage between milk and butter. If you stop it earlier, your butter will be more similar to cream than if you stop it later.

The point of churning is to produce a butter with high fat content, removing the water and some of the protein and carbohydrates from the milk. If you stop it earlier than the commercial producers do, you will have more water and other stuff left inside, and the fat will still be a bit more emulsified, both because of the water present and because you won't have agitated it enough to have sufficient coalescence of the fat globules.

So, when producing butter, most cooks prefer the process to have been sufficiently to the point where they get commercial butter. It performs better than underchurned butter in baking and cooking, and many people prefer it as a spread. But if you like it not-completely-churned, then you can indeed go for butter which offers just that.