The Best Margarine is Made From Duck Fat

(Plus a Recipe for Fish, Seaweed and Butter)

I don’t know what I’d imagined making margarine would be like. I was certainly convinced that it would be extremely complicated. “Industrially hardened spreadable fat” according to Wikipedia. Doesn’t sound like a walk in the park.

I was pretty sure that impressive machines would be required, with pipes and a combustion chamber and maybe even a distillery, and that it would take at least two full days.

When I planned my trip to the Isle of Wight in order to make margarine, I decided to stay three days, just to be sure. Something could go wrong. As it turns out, I was kidding myself. Anyone who wants to can make margarine in their kitchen. It takes exactly ten minutes, and it needs nothing more than a pot, a stove, a whisk, fresh buttermilk and a bit of fat — ideally beef fat.

The story of margarine actually begins with suet (beef fat): in 1869 the French chemist Hippolyte Mége Mouries patented a technique to make, from beef fat and skim milk, a cheap “Butter for the Working Classes”. Because he (erroneously) believed that the most common saturated fatty acid in suet was margaric acid, he named his product margarine.

The first time I heard this story was from, of all people, Patrik Johannson, a man who became famous as ‘The Butter Viking’. Or at least, as famous as a butter-maker can be.

There are few people in this world — perhaps none — who know as much about butter as Patrik. For years he made butter for Noma in Copenhagen, Claridge’s in London, and many other fine-dining restaurants. For a long time he lived in the woods a few hours out of Göteborg, but in the summer of 2016 he moved to the Isle of Wight, an island off the coast of Britain, not too far from London — because there are more fine-dining restaurants in England than in Sweden, hence more potential customers, and aside from that, there’s the delightful cream from the island’s Guernsey cows.

For his most famous creation, the ‘virgin butter’, he cultivates the cream with four different cultures and leaves it to sour over many days at different temperatures. He also makes a ‘beurnaise butter’ that’s melted and emulsified with a little buttermilk, and a ‘seaweed butter’ with seaweed he collects himself. Out of interest he once soured butter using the bacteria from the hands of the people working at Noma, another time with grass from the very field dined upon by the cows who provided the milk. And he has many butters buried under the turf: one has been ripening for the past three years. He wants to find out what exactly the so-called ‘Bog Butter’ is all about — barrels with butter more than one thousand years old that archaeologists are always unearthing in England and Scandinavia. And now and again, when he has a little time, Patrik makes margarine. But only the good stuff, made from beef or pork fat. “I was really furious about the margarine industry always saying that margarine is healthy and butter is terrible for you”, says Patrik. “So I looked into what margarine actually is. And in a French databank I stumbled across the original recipe.”

Margarine is an emulsion, i.e. a mixture of two substances that normally, without outside influence, would not mix — in this case fat and water. Other examples of emulsions are milk or mayonnaise. These mixtures can be either temporary or stable: for a vinaigrette a bit of oil and vinegar are briefly bound together through mechanical action — whisking. But when you stop, a minute later the two components separate again. And if you let fresh milk stand overnight, in the morning the fat — the cream — will be sitting on the top (and out of this, you make butter).

In order for the combination to be stable, an emulsifier is required: for the beef fat margarine the lecithin in the buttermilk serves this purpose (similar to mayonnaise, which has lecithin from the egg yolk). For industrially produced margarine considerable force is used to carry this out. Patrik’s recipe, in contrast, goes like this:

1. Heat the fat of your choice — beef, pork, duck, seal, whatever you have at hand — until it liquefies, and bring it ideally to 30 degrees.
2. Pour the buttermilk (either from homemade sour cream or from the supermarket) very slowly into the fat and whisk it like you would a mayonnaise, quite briskly and constantly.
3. Keep going until the fat-cream has a nice consistency. Remember that margarine will get harder once it’s been refrigerated.
4. Salt to taste. That’s it. Really.

Patrik and I made ours with pork fat because, despite the three days and month-long discussions beforehand, at the time we had only pork fat to hand. The result was creamy, a little sour, easy to spread, and a bit porky. Patrik said that margarine made out of slightly browned duck fat is much better. “I think the very best is ‘butter-margarine’ made from clarified brown butter. It combines the fresh acidity of the buttermilk with delicious brown butter notes.”

Because the whole procedure didn’t exactly take all day, we wandered down to the beach beneath Patrik’s house and bought some local fish, collected some fresh seaweed and made something with his butter. Here’s the recipe:

For two people you need:

Two freshly caught thick fish fillets with the skin on, cod for example. Half a kilo of fresh spinach. Half a litre of fresh cream, ideally from Guernsey cows. A chunk of freshly collected seaweed. A couple of spring onions. A nice big chunk of cultured butter.

Put the seaweed and the cream in a pot and bring it to a simmer. Take it off the heat and let it sit. Chop the white part of the spring onions finely and fry them briefly in a bit of the butter. Throw in the spinach and cook until it shrinks and softens a little. Melt the rest of the butter in a pan. Lay the fish in the pan skin down and fry on low to medium heat until the skin is crispy. Ladle the melted butter over the fish every now and again. If everything goes well, the fish will be cooked just above the crunchy skin, above that, it should still be pink and pearly. Take the seaweed out of the cream, heat it up again, mix in the spinach and place it on a warm plate. Lay the fish on the spinach, skin up, and strew the chopped spring onions over the top.

This story is from All You Can Eat #1, the fat issue. You can order the magazine via www.allyoucaneatmagazine.com.