In light of all of serious political debate going on here, I thought I’d lighten it up just a little bit with something non-political that causes a great debate among some people. This may be IMHO territory but I thought it would fit here nicely. Here it is;
Do you refrigerate your butter?
I do not. I leave a stick of it out for about a week in a butter dish. Some people think I am crazy and it will cause foodborne illness. Never had a problem. I just won’t do it anymore because cold butter is harder to mix in recipes and it is essentially useless in terms of spreading it on bread.
Most of the opposition stems from one’s fear of foodborne illness, I disagree.
One stick of butter in the dish out in the open. The rest of the sticks in the pound of butter in the fridge. The rest of the pounds of butter from the Costco package in the freezer.
I use butter every day for breakfast (well, most weeks), and it’s never gone bad.
This is pretty much my routine, too, except I don’t buy butter from Costco (there isn’t one close) and the butter dish is covered. It’s never gone rancid. I do keep my house at a fairly cool 63F year round, though, so even when the butter is soft, it really isn’t.
We refrigerate ours, yeah. It’s not that we’re worried about it so much as we very rarely need softened butter. There’s just no advantage to leaving it out to go bad faster. Pretty much the only time you’ll see butter sitting out around here is when we buy a big log of Amish butter. We’ll let that sit out to soften enough to easily portion it out into ice cube trays for convenient use.
I have an eighteen year old, unsealed (already opened), unused, and still fresh jar of Vegemite on my desk. No sign of rancidity(?) or other deterioration.
Shall I use it to coat my butter stick sitting on the kitchen counter so it keeps a while longer?
I am surprised it even got this much traction, I guess I just assumed that there would be considering how varied the opinions on it are in some circles… Up next; Do you refrigerate your ketchup?
Rancidity is caused by oxygenation, which means that reducing the amount of air exposure the butter gets will slow it. A proper butter dish has a slight moat you can fill with water to produce an airtight seal, and the lid is only slightly larger than a stick, leaving very little air in it, so it’ll stay good for a good while. And even if it doesn’t, rancidity isn’t actually dangerous; it just tastes bad. So you don’t have to worry about foodborne illness: If it smells and tastes OK, it is OK,
I keep the butter in a covered dish on the counter in the winter and in summer, that covered dish must stay in the fridge because otherwise the butter oils. In either place, I try not to place it next to onions, garlic, and the like lest it pick up the scent.
I am surprised it even got this much traction, I guess I just assumed that there would be considering how varied the opinions on it are in some circles… Up next; Do you refrigerate your ketchup? 