This bread pudding doesn't just look pretty, those toast points have a function: to make the dish something more than just a mass of wet, sweet bread. This bread pudding is actually crunchy in parts, and that keeps every mouthful interesting. Serve this plain or with a sauce of your choice. Caramel is a classic, but a fruit sauce (like raspberry) works great also.

Bread selection is key. You want a tight-crumbed white bread that's not fluffy like a mass-market bread. You also want it a little stale.

See? It doesn't bend, it breaks when I put pressure on it. That's a good thing.

Trim the crusts and cut the slices in half.

Butter them lightly with soft butter.

Lay the triangles out on a sheet pan.

And toast lightly under the broiler on one side.

Arrange them in a 12 or 13-inch dish. Oval is nice.

Combine the vanilla seeds and milk in a small saucepan and bring to a simmer.

Meanwhile, combine your whole eggs, yolks and sugar in a large bowl...

...and whisk until pale in color.

Add the hot milk to the egg mixture in a steady stream, whisking all the while.

Strain the custard into another bowl, then slowly pour it into the baking dish. Use a spatula to keep the toast from floating around too much.

Put the dish into a larger pan (like a roasting pan) and carefully add boiling water. You want enough water to come half way up the side of the dish.

Press the toast down once or twice to help it absorb the custard. Bake in a 425 oven for 30 minutes. Serve it warm with a sauce of your choice. Or, cool it completely and refrigerate it, covered only lightly with foil, until needed. The toast will stay crispy for 24 hours. It's excellent, maybe even better, cold.

In France and in most food industry circles, the name Lenôtre is legendary. It stands for a man — an exacting and genial fellow who was both respected and loved — but also for a global empire of schools, pastry shops, restaurants and catering facilities. I think of him as the first truly modern master pâtissier, a man who not only had formidable culinary and leadership skills, but an instinctive grasp of the potential of modern techniques, technologies and brands. He embraced it all while still staying true to his quality and craft ideals.

Perhaps it was his teenage experiences peddling homemade chocolates by bicycle that gave Lenôtre a lifelong fascination with the concepts of finished food delivery and scalability of production. He built the first chain of bakery boutiques Paris had ever seen. He was the first Frenchman to put a bakery/café in a shopping mall, the first to create a national brand of frozen desserts and the first person ever to create an international chain of bakery franchises. For all that, he never abandoned his commitment to perfect quality and execution. In time he expanded into full-menu restaurants and catering. With the help of large-scale production facilities and — gasp — freezers, Lenôtre was able to deliver perfectly crafted meals to any size crowd virtually anywhere in the world. Need a seven-course French meal for 10,000 served hot in Japan? Lenôtre was your man. In 1998 he catered the World Cup in France, attended by an estimated 800,000 fans.

Of course none of this could have been achieved (at least, not in a country like France) had he not been a first-class practitioner of the pastry arts. At the level of craft he is often credited with introducing "nouvelle cuisine" concepts to pastry. That's not strictly true if you buy in to the idea that "nouvelle" is all about small portions and hyper-artsy presentations. If you adhere to the idea that nouvelle cuisine means freshness, lightness, simplicity and creativity of presentation, then the label fits. His books are filled with recipes whose simplicity belies their sophistication and excellence. They are true treasures.

From my own vantage point, I think that one of the key things that Lenôtre showed the world is that modern tools, when used thoughtfully, can be wonderful things. That technology isn't inherently evil, that newfangled machines can make better food available to more people, and that just because something is big it isn't necessarily bad. No wonder that when Lenôtre celebrated his 80th birthday in 2000, his students made him a 35-foot-tall cake. Lenôtre died in January of 2009. He will be remembered as one of the century's most creative and consequential chefs.

Such is the subject line of an email I received from reader Alek, who wonders why I have yet to write a critical review of Michael Pollan's latest book, Food Rules. It's the latest in a long series of emails I've received since the book came out in January. I'll admit I've been tempted at various points, and came very close in the early spring. I actually had a copy in-hand in the checkout line at Borders one afternoon. Standing there, I began to leaf through it, and shortly realized that what I was holding wasn't really a book. Rather, it was just a bunch of bits and pieces of text culled from various email conversations, all pasted together. Its only reason for being: to give Pollan's publisher, Penguin, a revenue stream while he researches his next oeuvre. I was immediately put in mind one of those sitcom "clips shows" where the cast sits around reminiscing about their escapades between bits of recycled footage.

Who would ever want to watch that? And who, really, wants to read something like Food Rules? It's nothing more than a preachy list of reasons — 64, to be exact — to feel guilty about what you eat. That fact alone, I would think, would give all but his most devoted fans reason enough not to buy it. Why should I pile on?

Reader Katy asks:

Have you ever made Krispy Kreme Bread Pudding? It's just a big stinkin' pile of Krispy Kremes with yummy cream sauce over it. Uh....yum.

Never made it, never eaten it, but if some were put in front of me I wouldn't say no (I like Krispy Kremes). I'll also confess to you that I've always harbored a secret desire to make this recipe, gratuitous as it is. But don't tell anyone, OK?

Chef Laura writes:

I have never really understood the whole scald-the-milk-for-a-still-custard thing. I understand the neccessity for creme anglaise and pastry cream, but I don't get the importance for baked custards. I scanned previous posts and didn't see an answer to this. I have nothing in my notes from school. I have made bread pudding without this step and it has been just fine, but in professional kitchens I had to scald the milk, pour it over the eggs, and then strain it. Why?

That's a question that may have no answer, though you often see it discussed in pastry forums. Why bother with this step? What purpose does it serve? In the case of the bread pudding recipe below, it serves the function of thoroughly infusing the milk with vanilla. But what if I were using vanilla extract? Would I do it? Umm...

My feeling is that scalding milk for still custards like quiches is a holdover from days when chefs used fresh-from-the-dairy (read: unpasteurized) milks. Which is to say it's very likely a safety thing, not necessary anymore. Yet top chefs from many quarters still insist that scalded milk delivers a more velvety texture in a still custard than milk that's straight from the bottle. Is that because hot milk helps to uncoil egg proteins? Does it change the milk's composition in some way? It is simply because a warm mixture cooks more evenly when it's put into the oven?

Both are at least plausible answers in the absence of an authoritative one. Until that answer comes, milk scalding will continue on as popular kitchen voodoo.

Thanks for that excellent question, reader Cindy! In fact the word "stale" is akin to "aged", but in a good way. "Ripened" is more like what it means. We moderns, addicted as we are to perfectly fresh bread, would scarcely think of applying a world like that to a past-its-prime loaf. But the ancients (and not-so-ancients) did, mostly because they had no alternative.

But what is staling exactly? Most people think of it as the "drying out" of bread, but that's not the half of it. If it were, fresh bread kept in a tight sheath of plastic wrap would never go stale. I think we've all experimented with double and triple layers of Reynold's Wrap long enough to know what a fool's paradise that is. So what is it with bread that it starts to harden the moment it's removed from the oven? It all has to do with the behavior of starch molecules. Surprised?

Starch is made up of two base components, both of them long-chain sugars, also known as carbohydrates: amylose and amylopectin. Both are made up of many many units of glucose, and that makes them similar. Yet those units of glucose are configured differently, which causes them to behave in very different ways. Amylose is built like a narrow bundle of reeds, with all of its glucose units (up to 1,000 or so) arranged in straight, parallel chains. Amylopectin, in the other hand, looks more like a shrub, with its glucose units (up to 20,000 of them) going off every which way.

Hundreds or thousands of both make up a typical starch "granule" (or single grain of flour) with the long straight amylose in nice orderly layers (starch crystals) and the amylopectin in big bushy heaps. Add water and heat to that scenario (dough making and baking) and things start to change. The bonds that keep the carbohydrate molecules bunched together weaken, and water molecules start getting in between them. The starch granule swells.

This continues until the finished bread is taken out of the oven, at which point the process starts to reverse itself. The carbohydrate molecules start to reorder themselves. It doesn't happen quickly, but it does happen inexorably. The carbs, especially the amyloses, become re-attracted to one another and begin stacking themselves back up again in neat piles, making hard crystals once again. The water molecules are forced out from between them, and shortly evaporate.

So you see, bread goes stale not just because it's dryer, but because its structure is also harder. If you own a microwave you've no doubt noticed that you can re-gelatinize starch to some extent with a little fast heat. But with much of the water already gone, the effect is fleeting, barely enough time to butter that scone and stuff it into your mouth!

UPDATE: Reader Bronwyn writes:

The effect of hardening starch is most obvious with rice. You can keep it as airtight as you like, but after a night in the fridge it turns into little unpalatable hard things. Excellent for making fried rice though. Likewise, it doesn't matter how dry you cook rice it's not great to fry until the next day.

That is a question for the ages, for it seems that as long as humans have had access to both stale bread and milk, they've put the two together and baked them. Bread pudding predates the concept of sweet pudding as we know it, probably by millennia. Virtually all our modern dessert puddings are descendants of sausages. They're the sweet grain-based cousins of blood-and-offal mixtures that were traditionally stuffed into bladders and boiled. These so-called "white puddings" only became widespread in Europe in the 1600's when the pudding cloth was invented.

Bread pudding is much, MUCH older. It goes back past the Romans, past the Greeks, probably even past the Egyptians who enjoyed a variant which (today) goes by the name of Om Ali, a mixture of milk, bread, raisins and nuts. Indian shahi tukra is a very similar thing, a preparation of fried bread sweetened with syrup and cream. You know, I'd be willing to bet that wherever you find bread-baking livestock-herding societies on Earth, you'll probably find a traditional bread pudding-like dish. It's that good an idea.

Though I'm not in the habit of giving plugs, the queen of gelatin desserts, Lourdes Reyes Rosas, will be coming to the States — to my old home town of Chicago — to teach some classes on gelatin dessert design. Lourdes Reyes' skill with gelatin simply amazes me. If you haven't seen her site you should check it out. I'm going to try to go, if only to see how this sort of magic is done.

Classes are $60 each plus tools. For further information contact Nachi Bresnahan at nrbres@wowway.com or call (630)983-9743.

Because so many bread puddings can get mushy, I like Gaston Lenôtre's version the best. Not only is it classic Lenôtre — simple and light yet elegant — it delivers a range of textures from crispy to tender to soft. You'll need:

6-7 ounces sliced sandwich bread, crusts removed and cut into triangles
about two ounces butter (salted or unsalted)
1/2 cup sugar
3 eggs
2 egg yolks
2 cups whole milk
seeds of one vanilla bean

Set your oven to broil while you prepare the bread. Once it's cut, butter it lightly. Lay the triangles out on a sheet pan and place the pan under the broiler until the bread is lightly toasted on one side. When the toast has cooled, arrange the slices in a medium oval or rectangular baking dish. Set the dish aside while you prepare the custard.

Turn the oven on to 425 and set a pot or large tea kettle of water on to boil. Combine the eggs, yolks and the sugar in a large bowl and whip until pale yellow and frothy. Combine the milk and the vanilla seeds in a small saucepan and bring to the boil. Remove the pan from the heat and slowly pour the milk mixture into the egg mixture, whisking all the while.

Holding the bread down with a large spatula, gently pour the custard into the dish. Place the dish in a larger pan — like a roasting pan — and carefully pour in enough boiling water so it comes half way up the side of the baking dish. Put the whole works in the oven on a middle rack and bake for 30 minutes. Serve warm or cold, it will keep in the refrigerator for several days, though will start to lose its crunch after a day or so.

A simple bread pudding doesn't have terribly many ingredients, which means, according to Joe's Inverse Law of Ingredient Dynamics*, that the ingredients you use should be good ones. Good milk, fresh eggs and fresh, real vanilla beans are all desirable. However no single ingredient will effect the quality of your pudding like the bread. It needs to have just the right texture, so you want to be choosy. What are consequences of not picking the right bread? In a word: mush. Typical mass-market sandwich bread will simply not make good bread pudding.

Oh sure, you can use things like brioche, croissants or panettone if you want. However most of us don't have that sort of stuff laying around in our kitchens getting stale. And anyway it's called "bread" pudding, right? My feeling is that anyone should be able to make a great bread pudding with stuff that's more or less on-hand.

So, the bread. You want something white, with a pretty tight crumb that's also at least a little bit firm. If it's also stale, so much the better, however stale Wonder bread is out. For all you readers in America, think Pepperidge Farm white sandwich bread, or an organic white sandwich loaf from a Whole Foods or local bakery (I bring up organic not because I advocate organic, but because the bread won't have the same preservatives, so it'll be drier and tougher than most big national brands). That sort of thing you can use right out of the bag, though at least some staling will make it even better.

But do the best you can. There really are no rules here, but if you can be choosy, do be.

*States that as the number of ingredients in a given recipe goes down, the relative quality of those ingredients should go up.

Though I'm technically onto another project, it's hard to say no to more questions about butter. The topic is just that interesting. Reader Austin asks:

You mentioned that winter butter has more saturated fat in it than summer butter. Why?

Great question. The reason is simply because pasture grasses have more unsaturated and polyunsaturated fats in them than grain, and grain is what dairy cows are/were traditionally fed in winter. What, you didn't think plants had fat in them? They do. From reader Sally:

I remember from an old post that shortening has no water, can it be used to make laminated pastry?

It can be, but shortening doesn't have much flavor, plus it's got a greasy mouthfeel. A better choice is margarine, which is also 100% fat. Many croissants produced on the Continent are in fact made with margarine. It tastes similar to butter of course, yet margarine still presents a problem with greasy texture. The reason is because unlike butter, which melts at around 90 degrees, margarine has a melt point around 105, which means it doesn't liquify in the mouth. Classic "c"-shaped croissants can legally be made with margarine in France. However straight ones must be made from nothing but whole butter. Or do I have that backwards? Reader Ed comments:

Francisco Migoya, chef instructor at the CIA tells the story of how me made croissants using fois gras instead of butter - thinking he would have the richest, most luxurious of all pastries - as they were baking the whole kitchen smelled of fois gras. The finished croissants were nicely laminated, but had almost no fois gras flavor. A very expensive lesson and not one that would have been made in a for profit restaurant, God bless academia!

He also asks:

Instead of trying to cook the water out as in brown butter, could you not dry butter in the fridge? Assuming you had, let's say an old fridge you keep in the basement - to keep, I dunno, beer cold? And if this mythological fridge were cleaned well, to remove as much odor as possible, couldn't the butter be cut into cubes, spread on a cookie sheet and left uncovered in the fridge overnight?

I suppose it's possible, but I'm a little skeptical that enough water would evaporate from the butter to make a difference. However here's another thought offered by Chef Laura:

The New French Baker (Sheila Linderman) describes a technique for drying out butter (as an alternative to adding flour to it). She says that if you pound the butter, beads of water will come out. You pat the butter dry as it exudes moisture during the pounding process.

Or I suppose you can just make your own butter and squeeze the heck out of it like reader Evan suggested in the cultured butter post.

UPDATE: Chef Laura says:

Supermarket brands of margarine have water in the ingredients. I think that there are specialty margerines produced that are specially formulated for making laminated doughs.

Thanks for helping to keep me honest, Laura!

I confess that as with tiramisu, I've experienced repeated twinges of anxiety as I've watched bread pudding creep up the list. That's for good reason, for just like tiramisu, bread pudding has been done to the point of absurdity over the years. Once monuments to simplicity, today you can find bread puddings built on everything from croissants and crackers to biscuits and doughnuts. Flavor-wise there's every fruit under the sun, plus triple chocolate, bourbon, peanut butter & jelly, goat cheese & leek, pumpkin & sage, sorrel & artichoke, white chocolate, tequila, bacon and cajun spice. There are bread pudding soufflées and bruleés.

What to do in the face of all that? Why, go back to basics of course! See you tomorrow!

Reader Nicole writes:

You mention in several places the importance of relatively dry butter, and it got me thinking - could you make laminated dough with cooled browned butter, since the cooking process will drive off some water? How about something more solid at room temperature, like cocoa butter or coconut oil (the kind that comes solid in jars)? I plan to try this myself at some point, but I live in swamp cooler country, so I'll have to wait for things to be a little less damp in my kitchen before giving it a go. I thought I'd see whether you knew anything about this, though - I'm sure the crystal structure of butterfat must change after browning and resolidification, but the thought of a brown butter croissant leaves me weak-kneed, as does one made with cocoa butter.

Very interesting issues you raise, Nicole. I know that it is possible, under the right conditions, to melt butter and remove both the water and the solids. This is frequently done on the Continent to make specialty, extra-dry (virtually 100% butterfat) pastry butters. I've never produced anything but butterfat slush melting and cooking butter at home. This, I believe, is due to the fact that heat destroys the protein film around fat globules, creating too much flowing "free" fat which doesn't crystallize. I need to do a little more research on that to make sure, though.

Concerning cocoa butter and laminated dough, you anticipate Hervé This perfectly. He too fantasizes about all-chocolate croissants. The trouble with using cocoa butter itself is that it's essentially flavorless. However if you and Hervé put your heads together, I'm sure you'll come up with something. Thanks for the terrific email!

UPDATE: Chef Camillle writes:

Just had to respond to the question about making laminated doughs with cocoa butter. In my view, the biggest problem is not the flavor, it's the texture. Pure cocoa butter, as you may know, is rock-hard at room temperature. I've never really seen it in a malleable form like dairy butter, it's either hard or liquid in my experience. As for the flavor, the lack thereof is not an intrinsic quality of cocoa butter, but a result of manufacturing practices. The trouble is that cocoa butter is more valuable as a cosmetic ingredient than as a foodstuff, so the general protocol on most plantations is to deodorize it all. If you've ever had white chocolate made with non-deodorized cocoa butter (El Rey and Askinosie are the only companies I know of that
make it this way), you'll taste the difference immediately.

Reader Diane offers a flurry of interesting questions:

I was under the impression that salted butter has more water content than unsalted butter. I may be wrong. And it seems you wanted drier butter for Kouign Amann. So why not use unsalted butter in Kouign Amann? Also when buying salted butter I do not know how much salt is there. So If I want to use unsalted butter, so that I can control the salt, can I add the salt to the pastry? If so how much?

Taking the first part first, salted butter doesn't have more moisture than unsalted butter, it's simply salted. And while some butter manufacturers list how much salt is in their butter, not all of them do. I usually take the words "lightly salted" to mean 1% salt, and "salted" to mean 2% salt. That's not based on any industry knowledge, mind you, mostly wishful thinking.

Lastly, you can indeed substitute unsalted butter for salted butter in kouign amann and salt the dough instead. Use 2 teaspoons of salt in the mix. Your rising time will need to double in that case, since the salt will keep the yeast reproduction down. Proofing time will increase by about 75%.

Thanks for the email, Diane!

Reader Mike writes:

Growing up, we never kept butter in the fridge, we kept it in a cupboard, in a cool dark dry place. I mentioned this fact aloud when I lived in CA or NY or one of the places in between, and my roommates looked at me like I had said I wanted to be skinned alive and dipped in the great salt lake. I'm curious about how the "other parts" of the world (i.e. not Iowa) do it.

My impression is that in the US we mostly refrigerate ours, at least these days. However I remember as a child, many of my friends' families used tabletop crocks or butter dishes. I suspect that most of the rest of the butter-eating world keeps theirs at room temperature, but that's just a guess

The issue for keeping butter isn't so much contamination, since microbes have a hard time thriving anywhere where there isn't much water. The bigger problem is that butter picks up "off" flavors so easily. I think the presumption in the States has been that refrigerators do a better job of protecting butter from cooking odors. However refrigerators trap and hold quite a lot of odors too, as anyone who's ever tried to keep Thai leftovers for very long surely knows.

Maybe the Scots and Irish of old had the right idea. They kept theirs in wood buckets immersed in peat bogs. The cool, wet, anaerobic environment kept this "bog butter" preserved for years, centuries even. People cutting peat for fuel still find the stuff from time to time, some of it thousands of years old.

Several questions have come in along those lines the last few days. "Dry butter" is a term that French pastry chefs frequently employ, usually in regard to the cultured butter they use for laminated pastry. I confess I don't know what the technical definition of dry butter is in France (France being France, I'm sure it's codified under law somewhere). I do know this: normal American butters are usually about 80% butterfat, 17% water and 3% protein. That's "wet" by European standards, where butter is more like 82% fat and 15% water. That, according to some pastry chefs I've talked to, makes standard European butter "dry."

However butter can get quite a bit drier. The Vermont Creamery, I know, makes cultured butter that is 86% butterfat, which is the driest American butter I'm aware of. Is French "dry butter" drier still? I honestly don't know. Perhaps someone out there who knows would care to weigh in.

One thing I do know is that no matter how dry American butters may get, they will not have the same combination of dryness and firmness that French "winter butter" has, for reason I explained below. Just like French flour, some ingredients simply can't be reproduced in other locales. We must do the best we can with what we have. As must the French when they set out to make blueberry muffins.

Because nobody else is going to save you any, that's for sure. It's just too sweet and buttery. Tender on the inside and crispy around the edges like a croissant, it has a crackly caramel top that adds just the right je-ne-sais-quois (I wrote that in French because don't know how to say it in Breton).

I'll admit that this "simple butter cake" kicked my can this week. I went into it thinking I'd be able to do it blindfolded, since I consider lamination something of a specialty. Five days, two sacks of flour and $40 worth of butter later, my pride was in the ash can, along with sixteen awful kouigns. Say what you will about the recipe I finally settled on, it's been tested!

Earlier in the week I wrote that I'd be leaving the sugar out of the folding process. However rolled-in sugar is one of the defining features of this bread. In the end I couldn't leave it out. The kouign amann that resulted didn't rise as high as the version without the rolled-in sugar, but the result is probably a lot closer to the real thing. Here's how it goes. Combine your flour and yeast in a mixer fitted with a paddle and add the melted butter...

...and the water.

Stir until everything is moistened, then switch to the dough hook and knead for about a minute. The dough will be a bit shaggy, that's OK. If it's very shaggy and won't hold together at all, add a bit more water. It will smooth out and become more elastic as it rises.

Press it together into a ball, put it into a large bowl and apply some oil or nonstick spray. Since this dough has lots of yeast and no salt, it's going to take off like a rocket. Half an hour should be plenty of time for rising.

When the dough has about ten minutes to go, make your butter block according to the directions for laminating dough under the Techniques menu. Pastry Chef Laura suggested that working a couple tablespoons of flour would help absorb moisture and make the resulting pastry flakier. Why didn't I think of that? Add it.

When the dough has risen and is nice and puffy, you're ready to roll. Literally.

Lightly flour your board...

...and pat the dough into a square.

Apply your butter. My block isn't perfect, but by this time I'd made kouign amann nine times. I was frustrated. Anyway, this is a rustic pastry, right? Oh, and I should mention that you want the best quality salted butter you can lay your hands on for this. As with every laminated dough, butter is the star, so don't skimp if you can help it. Euro-style cultured butters will not only taste better for this, they'll be drier, and that will give you a better result.

Make your butter envelope...

...roll it out...

...and letter fold it.

Lay it out on a lightly floured sheet pan (I forgot the flour here), cover it with plastic wrap and refrigerate it for 20 minutes. This is the first of your three "turns."

After twenty minutes, do another "turn", which is to say, repeat the rolling and letter fold and return the dough to the refrigerator for another twenty minutes. The dough will hold at this point, if you wish, for 2-3 days in the refrigerator and 2-3 months in the freezer, cut into pieces of course. If you don't want this much dough you can cut the below recipe in half, even half again if you only want to make one pastry.

When you're ready to make your pastries, do your final turn. This time you're going to add sugar to the top of the dough before you fold it. Here I'm adding too much. What can I say, I got excited. I brushed about a third of it off.

But Joe, you said sugar is a no-no for laminated doughs! Yes, and it is if you allow the butter and sugar to come into direct contact. However if there's a layer of dough in between, you don't get the same reaction, provided you don't allow the sugared dough to sit for very long (as in several hours).

Fold the dough and put it back into the fridge.

Prepare your pan. Line a cake layer pan with parchment.

When you're all set to roll, take the dough back out of the refrigerator and cut it into pieces (there's enough dough here for four pastries, just under 16 ounces each). Turn one piece out onto your floured board and apply the pin.

Roll it to a rough circle and place it in the pan. Let it rise for about 1 1/2 hours until puffy. Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 400.

At that point, apply your egg wash...

...and a generous amount of sugar. This is necessary to create crunchy caramel top.

Bake until the bread has risen nicely and the top is a deep brown. Say, that's not a particularly appealing picture.

Oh yeah, that's what I'm talkin' bout.

Eat it warm. With wine or spirits it's especially good, and trust me, I needed that after the week I had.

UPDATE: Reader Evan D. adds:

I wanted to mention that Kouign Amman can be made from scrap croissant dough, and that this is how a lot of bakeries do it. An extra turn or two with superfine granulated sugar is all it takes. A little jam in the center really ties it all together.

I love questions like that, reader Melissa, thank you. Butter is salted for purposes of preservation. Modern refrigeration obviates the need for salt these days, but more than a few people are simply accustomed to the taste.

When butter manufacturers salt butter, they add salt at a proportion of 1 - 2%. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it goes a long way, especially when you consider how little water there is in butter. Water is the critical element that microbes need to grow in a mass of butter. However by adding that small amount of salt, a brine of about 10-12% salt is created, and that's an inhospitable environment for bacteria, molds and fungi.

Reader Alexandra writes:

Your post about the seasonal changes of dairy reminded me of a treat from my adoptive homeland, the Neterlands. There, we have something called graskaas (pron. hraahs-kaahs) i.e. grass cheese. It is from the time when cows first get to nibble the first shoots of grass after a long, long cold winter and also when they are suckling calves. This leads to a creamier cheese with a special flavor I've heard described many ways including grassy and nutty but for me it tastes the way the first few days of spring feel. That is to say still chilled and damp but GLORIOUS. One of the biggest cheesemakers in Holland, Beemster, makes this cheese but it is best from your local farmer (in a country that small, any farmer is local) is ever better because the farmers let their cows calve. As fall starts falling on us, it's nice to think about grass cheese.

I had no idea, but it makes all the sense in the world. Thanks for the email, Alexandra!

My feeling on that is yes. Though I'm not expert on Continental flours, it's my impression that the gluten in French flour behaves differently than that in American flours. It seems not to be as stretchy as our own, but firmer. That difference may also help retain the integrity of the layers in kouign amann when lots of sugar is added to the dough.