I hate being in France. Well, actually, I hate that France has all these cute cooking gizmos and I want to buy all of them damnit and it’s not as if I have a kitchen the size of Versailles. I guess I need to play Euromillions and just buy a bigger kitchen!
But anyway, I use very little butter and I’ve seen these butter knives which are specifically designed to makethin curls from fridge-kept butter. The house I’m staying at has one so I was able to try it and it works great. I am sooooo buying one!
The same organizations that issue dire warnings against eating rare steak and over easy eggs? :rolleyes: I’ll continue to keep my butter on the counter.
Cut off an appropriate amount and if the butter is not sufficiently plastic (ductile?) you mash/work the butter on your side-plate with your knife a bit. When it is suitably plastic you spread it on your toast.
I wonder if perhaps people aren’t paying attention to the expiration date on their butter if it’s going bad in 1-2 days at room temp.
Shelf life is 3 months for unsalted, 5 months for salted- past the date of manufacture. In my experience, the butter on the shelves is usually a few weeks old to begin with.
So if you’re in the crowd that doesn’t have high butter turnover, and your butter is expired or nearly expired, and you leave it out, it’s entirely conceivable that it might taste funky after a day or two (or even just when it warms up enough).
But fresh butter? Even in the summer (air-conditioned house) in a kitchen that stays about 74 degrees, salted butter stays fine for about a week or so. The real issue is that the butter is semi-liquid if the temperature gets any higher.
My brother’s a potter, and he recently started making French butter dishes. Google image search that phrase. It’s an interesting doohickey or maybe even a gizmo. He handed me one he’d made and I had no idea what it was until he explained it.
Has anyone complained about their butter going bad in two days at room temp? I said it oxidizes a bit, but i didn’t say it would do that in two days at cool room temp. Just that it would over the lifetime of a stick, which is often a couple of weeks at my house.
And i can’t imagine worrying about it getting unsafe, even in a couple of weeks. The rest of my oils, and my palm oil shortening, live fora couple of months at room temp and seem fine.
(Except I won’t buy canola oil, which uniquely goes rancid in my house and tastes nasty.)
