I regularly bake with salted butter and the full salt called for in recipes, and get no complaints. Maybe I like it salty, or maybe the difference really is too trivial for most folks to notice. As for the freshness issue, this is the one that I think is decades out of date: butter moves too quickly at most supermarkets today for freshness to be a serious concern.
Costco Organic butter is the best price performance trade-off I’ve found.
I’m with everyone else as far as “butter substitutes are the devil.”
Personally, I use Rochdale Farm’s Hand-Rolled butter. Really amazingly good, but pretty sure it’s not available nationwide.
I use “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter”
Organic Valley Cultured Butter (unsalted) is the closest I’ve come to “European flavor” butter, Lurpak or Elle & Vire.
We usually buy Tillamook, as it’s a local product, but sometimes buy what’s on sale. I like Organic Valley, also. For a real treat, I might order some Double Devon Cream or one of the French butters from iGourmet.com (caution: website not safe for your wallet).
We like Fleischmann’s Vegetable Oil Spread with Olive Oil.
As for butter, I like Tillamook and Land-O-Lakes. A lot of the time I’ll just buy whatever’s cheapest. I use butter as an ingredient, not a spread; so I only buy unsalted butter.
No butter substitute or salted butter in my house. We use a local brand of slightly cultured butter. If I want to salt it, I will. We freeze the butter and take it down 1/4 lb at a time.
My goodness – what an array of exotic-sounding specimens! I had no idea these all existed; I’ve got to get shopping! My guess is that a doctor would advise us to stay away from all of it but of course if we did that, there’d be a lot of things we’d never even taste.
Many thanks ~
I was using I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better for a while (though I usually use a store brand of real butter) and I read the ingredients and nutritional information that turned out to be the same as a stick of margarine. So no more ICBINB for us. Mr. S insists on Land O’Lakes and claims can tell it from any other kind.
We did try Kerrygold and were disappointed. I don’t know why it gets such rave reviews. It was yellow and greasy, like yellow Crisco, and didn’t taste like anything in particular at all. I still have a bit and use a little when cooking.
I like it, too, but their new square-ish container bites the big one. I also like the blue packet sweetener better than real sugar, so, yes I’m a mutant.
Just regular butter, no margarine or substitutes for me. It was something I started when I moved out on my own and decided I didn’t need the bright school bus yellow spread (or dead lard white in Quebec). When I was single, I found that buying real butter was a cost savings because a little goes a long way. At this point in my life, living with a popcorn fanatic makes it expensive though. In winter when he is really into popcorn I buy Imperial Margarine for his popcorn. Otherwise his snack is 10 cents worth of corn and $1.75 worth of butter congealing on the bottom of the bowl. Nasty.
Whatever butter was on special on shopping day.
Of the major brands I see in many stores, Lurpak.
For spreading we use Mainland Buttersoft, it is pure butter but triple churned or something to give it a more spreadable texture. It needs to stay refrigerated though, if you leave it out and it softens too much it becomes hard when put back in the fridge. For cooking we use whatever brand of salted butter that is both cheap and a convenient size to fit in our butter container.
Generally speaking, for cooking it’s whatever regular butter we can find- usually Sam’s Club.
But for applications like fresh bread or others where the butter’s flavor is front and center, I tend to prefer the French butter made in Normandy(salted), or barring that, any other good salted cultured butter.
My spread of choice is Brummel & Brown yogurt spread.
Another vote for Olive oil.
Plugra. Unsalted.
I use margarine on toast or a sandwich, always have. I only use actual butter for cooking when I use it for flavour.
Sometimes I have avocado instead of margarine if I’m having a chicken sandwich, but I don’t eat a lot of bread.