Picking the best butter, ice cream for dogs, robot chefs take over Asian kitchens

• The National Post does a blind taste test of four types of butter, from the widely available Lactantia to the gourmet Beurre Ancestral, proving that not all butters are created equal. Judges rate the butters on colour, texture, smell and, of course, taste. Ontario’s Golden Dawn comes out on top. [National Post]

• With lobsters being boiled to death, drowned in freshwater or ripped in half and left to slowly die, the crustaceans have certainly paid a high price for being so tasty. Thankfully, a British entrepreneur has developed a machine that kills the creatures painlessly, in about 0.3 seconds (it takes about three minutes when they are boiled). The mechanism raises its own moral conundrum, though: are restaurants and chefs ready to spend big bucks (the units cost £2,500 apiece) to alleviate some animal suffering? [Independent]

• Emergency trips to the LCBO or grocery store during a party will be a thing of the past with The Globe and Mail’s party math calculator. The contraption began as an Excel spreadsheet designed to determine how much wine, ice, limes, etc. one should purchase prior to hosting a party and has morphed into this downloadable spin wheel. [Globe and Mail]

• A new, incredibly complex-looking robot from Japan apparently makes perfect buckwheat noodles, which are normally precision-cut by chefs. Similar automatons seem to be taking over Asia, performing a variety of restaurant tasks from making sushi to taking food orders. No wonder Chinese chefs protested their electronic counterparts earlier this year. [Technabob]