Guys, I’m going to cut straight to the chase on this one. Chamois butter tastes terrible. It’s not good on toast, a scone, an English Muffin. I wouldn’t recommend it for baked potatoes or corn on the cob or a tub of fresh-popped popcorn. It makes a bad roux, and you can’t bake with it. And it has no salt in it at all, so even when you don’t notice its awful flavor, it still doesn’t bring that flavor-heightening pop that non-chamois-butter does.
It’s a bad idea to try to chamois butter someone up. Like that’s an HR incident that’s going to follow you for the rest of your career, not a momentary bit of casual flattery that’s going to help you realize some short-sighted career goal.
There is currently no product called I Can’t Believe It’s Not Chamois Butter! And that’s probably because everything that isn’t chamois butter, is pretty believably not chamois butter, with the possible exception of Crisco shortening. I kinda can’t believe Crisco is not chamois butter. Those guys should keep that in their back pockets for an eventual brand reboot.
Any tube of chamois butter should also make clear, in large print, that it’s not for buttering actual chamois, the large mountain sheep from whose leather the original bike diapers were made. Have you ever tried to butter a large mountain sheep? Me neither, but I’d love to see a video of someone trying. I have the vague idea that this is some folk festival ritual in the north of Spain. Any Basques able to enlighten us on that?
All of these lame jokes, by the way, are brought to you by the innocuous use of a single apostrophe, and the Kleenex-ization of a product you wouldn’t expect to be this fraught with linguistic peril. You see chamois butter isn’t a thing at all. The two-finger applied magic we all resort to occasionally (or everyday) is chamois cream. There is a chamois cream on the market called Chamois Butt’r, which plays not only on the word ‘butter’ but also on the word ‘butt,’ which is where a generous portion of it ends up. There’s a kind of triple entendre at work here, and I admire the sick individual who came up with it.
And like Kleenex, which is a brand name, Chamois Butt’r (see photo above) becomes chamois butter in the vernacular, and we use that term to refer to all chamois creams, not just the one with the clever linguist on payroll.
If you just slapped yourself in the forehead and exclaimed aloud, “Why am I spending my valuable time reading these words?” congratulations. You’ve not lost your mind yet. If, on the other hand, you’ve already chuckled twice in the last three paragraphs, congratulations! You’re as nuts as the rest of us (no pun).
Then there is ASSos Creme