It’s always irritated me when restaurants presented literally frozen butter–it’s useless! By the time the pats soften enough to spread (without tearing up the bread/rolls), the meal is over. I can understand storing butter in fridge, but why not take it out to thaw out before serving. A trick to save butter for next customer?
To stop it from going rancid.
Please ask the mods to change your headline to butter not bitter.
I’m referring to serving, not storing
Cold bitter WHAT?
The title got me wondering why is cold often associated with bitter?
And cold butter sucks! If you eat butter on a daily basis it will not go rancid.
sorry, fat fingers; how to contact mods?
They can’t store it at room temperature, and you can’t easily heat butter to room temperature without melting it. You have to let it sit out and come up gradually. So it’s served how it’s stored.
Whenever I get those foil-wrapped pats of butter at certain places, I usually heat them up between the palms of my hands to get them to spread. Only takes a minute and goes on a lot easier.
Why not? We never refrigerate butter.
Butter keeps fine at room temperature for days or a couple weeks. More if you keep it away from air in a proper butter keeper. Refrigerating butter is an American 1950s germophobe-ism that still survives.
I agree that butter cooler than room temperature is simply useless.
This. Just squeeze between palms and as you feel it starting to soften, knead it a bit still in the foil. I’ts real obvious when it’s soft enough.
Quick, not too difficult, but certainly ought to be completely unnecessary.
Or under your arm, like back in the day when you would warm a cassette tape in a cold car.
You’re not a restaurant. If you were, and a food safety inspector showed up, they’d want to know exactly how long that specific pat of butter had been out and see the documentation to support it. And they’d want to know it for every bit of butter you had out.
Specific laws are going to vary by state, but I’ll wager a few quatloos that no state says restaurants are free to keep butter out for a few days, give or take, just give it a sniff to make sure it hasn’t turned.
The USDA’s FoodKeeper app offers this guidance for storing butter: “May be left at room temperature for one to two days; one to two months when stored in refrigerator ; six to nine months if stored frozen.” After that, the taste can turn rancid or sour, says the USDA.
Can Butter Be Left Out on the Counter?.
Many restaurant kitchens are HOT, not a good place to keep butter as the “room temp” is higher than normal.
Salted butter can be left out longer than unsalted.
Around here, we leave it out during the winter months only. During summer it would melt.
I do the exact same thing. Best compromise I’ve come up with.
Leaving butter to sit out for a while actually strikes me as something that can be easily done! You remove the big bowl of butter pats from the fridge before opening, and put it back after closing. Not all restaurants serve cold butter, which suggests to me it’s just laziness rather than some significant difficulty relating to food storage and/or kitchen inspectors.
I mean, there’s always the crotch…
I wonder if there are food safety laws that tell restaurants to keep their butter chilled? That or just plain CYA (cover your ass) because someone, sometime, will eat at your place, get sick later and blame you and your warm butter (even if it had nothing to do with it).
Regular butter isn’t shelf stable, and it also doesn’t have a set number of hours it can sit out before turning. How will you know when a given individually wrapped pat is no good? How will you track which butter pats have been out for how many hours?
A lot of restaurants will use whipped butter, particularly whipped compound butter. Those are much easier to spread, even when cold, and they come up to temperature more quickly because they’re less dense.
A fancy restaurant will probably take butter out at regular intervals to bring it up to room temperature and then toss what doesn’t get used within a set window.
Have you ever been responsible for food safety at a restaurant? You don’t get to be lazy about this kind of stuff.
Huh? Should I have done that? I never knew. ( And I lived in some snowy places.) Did everybody do this except me?
I still have a few old cassettes in the attic. Maybe I should go up there now and stick 'em under my armpit? 
Oh, right. I’d been thinking that keeping it out eight or ten hours was clearly accepted as being safe, so it wouldn’t be a problem. But I neglected to consider that there would be no way to tell how many eight-hour shifts a particular pat might be left out before being used. Never mind.