New smoked butter from Abernethy
Abernethy Butter, Northern Ireland's award winning producer of handmade and hand rolled butter, has launched the first smoked artisan butter.
The new butter is based on the small company's successful hand churned butter that's won business from celebrated chefs such as Heston Blumenthal and Marcus Wareing as well as Fortnum and Mason and a string of upmarket delis in Britain.
Rolls of handcrafted butter are cold smoked for around an hour over a mixed wood biscuit in the company's own recently acquired smoker. This ensures total control of the process and complete provenance.
Leading chefs in Northern Ireland are already using the smoked butter which is being targeted initially at foodservice by the company, based at Dromara in county Down and run by husband and wife team Will and Allison Abernethy.
"While we've developed a good business in the UK and Ireland for our handcrafted butter and have other opportunities to explore for the product we saw a need to come up with something quite different particularly for high-end restaurants which are always seeking new and different flavours.
"We've enjoyed great support from many leading chefs since launching the butter and wanted to offer them something new and quite different for their menus. There are no plans, at this stage, to retail the smoked butter, the first product of its type, we believe, on the market.
"Flavoured butters have been available for some time, especially in the US, but this is the first smoked butter made from traditional churning and rolling techniques. It's another string for our bow. We realise that we can't build a business, even an artisan enterprise, based on just a couple of products."
Abernethy Butter, a UK Great Taste Award winner for its butter and handcrafted fudge, was formed in 2005 by the couple as part of a farm diversification project,
The small business began as a hobby focusing on a desire to preserve traditional butter making techniques and is now Ireland's only producer of handcrafted butter.