I was looking at recipies in an American magazine and many talked about a stick of butter (or 1/2, 1/4 etc). Now I’m a terrible cook so I could probably just guess the amount, mess the whole thing up and blame it on not knowing how much a stick was but just in case I want to increase my odds of cooking something succesfully could someone please tell me how much a stick of butter weighs? Thank you.
Oh bugger it! I can’t even spell recipe let alone follow one!
A stick of butter is usually a half a cup (four ounces).
Just checked the package… yup, it’s 4 ounces, or 113 g.
Australian cups and U.S. cups are not quite the same measure, so you may not want to go by that. Allrecipes.com has this handy conversions page for translating measures.
So, whatcha making? 
A stick is the same as four gribbles or half a snid.
Here’s something that’s always puzzled me.
If you just have a block of butter (like we get in Ireland and the UK), how do you measure a cup? Do you cut it into little chunks and press it into the cup, or do you then go to weighing it?
Thank you kindly.
Probably a really big inedible mess 
but I had my eye on a “Gooey butter cake”.
Do your blocks have the weight measures marked on the wrapper like ours do? If so, I’ve found that 50 g is so close to 1/4 cup US as to make no difference most of the time. So for instance to make chocolate chip cookies from a recipe requiring 1 cup of butter, I cut the block of butter at the 200g mark.
If not, well, 1/4 US cup is still 50g, but you’ll have to drag out your kitchen scales…
Yes, UK butter wrappers (often) have measurement markings on the paper edges - I think they are in some multiple of grammes.
They don’t in Ireland. 
It can get rather messy.
You can measure butter fairly accurately by using water displacement.
Say you need 1/4 cup of butter. Fill a larger measuring cup with one cup of water and add pieces of butter until the water reaches the 1 1/4 cup measurement mark. Drain off the water and voila, you are left with 1/4 cup of butter.
You can also measure by water displacement. Pour water into a measuring cup to the half-cup line. Add chunks of butter until the water reads at the one cup line. You now have a measured half-cup of butter.
I think I might try using water replacement. Just a hunch.
(Seriously, why didn’t I think of that? No Mensa for me.)
None of that tidy water displacement for me. I leave the butter out until soft then smoosh it into a measuring cup. Then I curse and grumble while I try to get the butter out of the measuring cup and into the ingredients.
Pffft. Water displacement. Rookies. :rolleyes:
You’re making gooey butter cake?
damn.
Can I come over?
Sure Filmgeek but it is a long way to come for an inedible mess. It does sound yummy though.
Ruby I’m glad I’m not the only one spending far too much time mucking about with the butter.
American (and Canadian) butter wrappers tend to have similar markings. Butter is usually sold in one-pound packages (450-g packages in Canada, IIRC.) Half of the package is a cup, a quarter of the package (one stick, if the package is divided into sticks - this seems to be a matter of regional preference) is a half-cup, and one thirty-second of the package is a tablespoon. Sticks are marked by tablespoons on the wrapper; if it’s not divided into sticks, then it’s marked by quarter-cups.
Here in the USA, you can get butter both in the one-pound blocks and in one-pound boxes, each containing 4 sticks. Thus, a stick is a quarter pound. That also happens to be a half cup. If you have butter in a one-pound block, you can cut it into four equal pieces to get the equivalent of one stick. If you need a quarter cup, divide the one-pound into 8 equal pieces.
In the rest of the world, I don’t know how your butter comes from the store. From the posts above, I’m assuming it isn’t conveniently divided into sticks, but I can’t tell what size the blocks are. If they are half-kilo bricks, treat them just like I described for one-pound blocks (500g is just a little more than a pound).
Here, butter comes in undivided 250g or 500g blocks usually (or 456g or whatever if people are still cutting them in pounds).
The problem I had until this thread was not dividing the butter up, but when following US recipes that call for butter-by-volume rather than by weight. Recipes from pretty much all of the rest of the world measure solids such as butter in weight (grams), and liquids in volume (millilitres). I have an American cup measure, but it didn’t help.
However, thanks to the SDMB, now I know how to relate the volume of butter to the weight, and I’ve got the water displacement method too. Hurrah!
'Course, if you’ve got a new pack of butter, it’s not rocket science to cut it into the requisite amounts… cut your 250g pack into quarters and each will be a fraction over 2oz.