I can tell the difference, but I like the taste of most canola oil margarine. I have, on occasion, tasted a brand of margarine that I disliked, however.
And you might enjoy it, too. This is one of several fallacies I see popping up in this thread – that vegetable oils are foul things that taste awful, so margarine must be, too. A nice touch before dinner is chunks of warm baguette dipped in a dish of olive oil – but a top quality olive oil with a streaky splash of traditional well aged balsamic vinegar running through it. Olive oil, balsamic, and the dinner wine that accompanies it – all are things with a vast continuum of quality between the best and the worst. And the good stuff can be very good indeed.
I don’t claim that the same is true with margarine, but there are certainly different qualities, and margarines have changed a lot since the early days. A couple of the other fallacies that turned up in some of the articles were claims that margarine is horrible unhealthy stuff because of hydrogenated oils, and because of trans fats. It would be true if they contained those things, but the better ones do not. The unsalted margarine I use contains zero trans fats and no hydrogenated oils, and I’m fine with the taste but I’m not a fanatic on the subject one way or the other and haven’t done an A-B comparison with butter. There certainly are bad margarines around including those with lots of saturated fats and trans fats, but that’s what labels are for.
Meh. I work for a living. I’m not going to eat globs of space goop instead of rich creamery butter just because it’s cheaper. Madison Avenue has brainwashed people into thinking margarine is equal to butter. How sick.
ETA: What a coincidence this thread is. Right after my last post my wife came in the door with a bag of Italian rolls and a pound of European butter from Sciortino’s Bakery. I was so thrilled I forgot to ask her what the heck she was doing over on the crazy east side.
If you use it so infrequently that a stick is lasting a month or two, you might try cutting a stick into smaller pieces and storing most of them in the freezer (along with any unopened sticks).
Also, I find that keeping unwrapped butter in a glass butter dish which in turn is kept in the fridge butter keeper maintains the freshness very well. (I probably have never had a stick last for two months, though.)
It’s vegetable oil for fuck’s sake. Stop perpetuating the myth.
Or just use margarine.
The vegetarian version of lard. Do you put a glob of lard on your hot baked potato? I didn’t think so.
Or a clump of wino gingivitis cheese. I can’t imagine it being much different.
Sorry. I really can’t stand margarine and comparing it to butter is an insult to the universe.
It’s vegetable oil.
Have you ever opened a can of Crisco? You’re telling me that doesn’t look just like lard?
In my state the law says if restaurants serve margarine they also have to serve real butter. Given the choice at the same price would you really choose margarine over butter? You’re creeping me out. Blech.
BTW, the Italian rolls Doll bought were awesome. One of these with the European butter would change your point of view real quick, I think.
I like butter just fine.
I LOVE cheese.
There’s nothing wrong with margarine. It’s a perfectly fine butter substitute for me. I really cannot tell the difference, and it probably is a bit more healthful, but I’m not making that claim here.
Who cares what it looks like? Animal fat and plant oils are two different things entirely.
You’re not making a good case for anything at all here.
For years we were all taught to believe: Veggie fat, good! Animal fat, baaaad! Because of the cholesterol, right?
Then we all had to re-learn: Trans-fat baaaaaaaaad! And saturated fat baaaaaad!
I became convinced that it was the trans-fat that was really killing us. Artificially hydrogenated vegetable fat, and I think also partially-hydrogenated veggie fat, contains a certain proportion of trans-fat. Supposedly, it used to be 50% trans.
But this was only true of artificially saturated (hydrogenated) fat, due to the chemical process of creating it. Each individual molecule had a 50% chance of becoming a trans-fat or a cis-fat. The modern process still creates all that, but now they have a process to filter out the trans-fat.
But naturally-occuring saturated fat (found in animal fats) never contains trans molecules (but for the occasional stray mutant molecule) and so was never the health hazard we were all raised up to believe.
Cite: I learned this from a friend who was a professional micro-biologist, so I presume he knew whereof he spoke. Later, another friend, seemingly possessed of similar knowledge, convinced me that butter was really a healthier choice than margarine. So ever since then, butter it is!
See my post just above. Crisco isn’t the plant oil that any plant ever produced. It is plant oil (which is unhydrogenated, causing it to be liquid at room temperature) which has then been artificially hydrogenated (saturated), causing it to be solid at room temperature.
As mentioned above (which I learned from my micro-biologist friend, who I think knows his stuff), the artificial process of hydrogenating oils randomly produces cis- and trans- molecules, resulting in 50% trans-fat, and this is what kills you.
Naturally-occuring fat, saturated or not, is never trans.
I think modern margarine is mostly free of trans fat because the hydrogenation process now includes a step to filter out the trans fat that was created in the artificial hydrogenation process.
Perhaps you’ve read all those stories about how Japanese people have lower heart attack rates despite the high fish content of their diets. And maybe you’ve read of one primitive tribe or another living in some jungle with typical life spans up into their 80’s or 90’s or 100’s, much to the amazement of the anthropologists who discovered them. And we wonder why us civilized Westerners are all dying of heart attacks.
It was all the generations who were raised up on Crisco, ever since the artificial hydrogenation process was invented (that is, since Crisco was invented) who have been poisoned by our life-long diets of stuff deep-fried in artificially saturated fat that was 50% trans fat. It was the trans-fat component of artificially saturated fat that poisoned us all.
Nothing wrong with vegetable oil. I just don’t like the taste.
There are fancy Italian restaurants that pour a pool of olive oil on a plate and expect you to dip your bread in that. I don’t like that either.
All the margarine I buy is non-hydroginated.
Again, I love butter, but I really can’t tell the difference.
I’m not a warrior for margarine or against butter, but since I sincerely can’t tell the difference I go with margarine.
ETA: The scare tactics toward margarine are unfounded bullshit.
I’m not exactly sure what that even means anymore.
Plant oils are unsaturated, and unsaturated oils are liquid at room temperature. Example: Mazola corn oil.
Margarine is made of plant oil (corn oil or your vary own Invented-In-Canada canola oil), yet it’s solid (sort of) at room temperature. They artificially partially hydrogenate it to make it so. I don’t doubt that it’s reasonably safe to eat these days, whereas it used to be a killer. I believe they have a process to filter out the toxic trans fat now, and that is how modern margarine is.
I grew up on margarine and always assumed it was because my mother thought it was healthier (though in retrospect, price may have been an issue too).
As soon as I was on my own, I switched to butter, partly for taste reasons and partly on the theory that healthy eating means eating less processed foods.
I can understand - I think - people preferring margarine if that is what they are used to. Since I haven’t had margarine in decades, I don’t know what mouth-feel it has in current fomulations. But the 1970s stuff was greasy in a coat-your-tongue-and-roof-of-your-mouth way that real butter isn’t. If you are accustomed to that sensation, I can see thinking butter is strange.
One more voice in the “butter tastes better” choir. I go through half-sticks of salted quickly.
Oh! And after wanting one for years we got a butter bell!! I’m delighted with it - butter stays spreadably soft AND fresh. 
tip-tapping away by phone, but why would you care?
I grew up in a household that ate margarine. Butter was only for special occasions such as holiday feasts. Upon joining the Navy in 1980, my diet stopped including margarine and contained butter instead. At the time, my palate wasn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate the upgrade.
When I got married in 1983, home-cooked meals and buying groceries became a thing in my life. Being conscious of the difference in price at the commissary, I was prepared to go back to margarine, but after one shopping run, kaylasmom wasn’t having any of that.
Except during times of extreme penury, I haven’t bought margarine since.
My wife is Italian and this is a staple of pre-dinner cuisine. The difference between that and margarine is the olive oil is in it’s natural state and nobody is using it as a substitute for anything other than it is. Margarine isn’t just vegetable oil. It’s vegetable oil that has had other gunk added to it, processed to high heaven, and then has the pretentiousness to insist you pretend it’s something it isn’t. A pound of lead isn’t equal to an ounce of gold and a pound of margarine isn’t equal to a teaspoon of butter.
But some people like Vaseline on toast. It’s a free country, eat what you like.