As I was setting out some butter to soften this morning for toast, I recalled a comment from someone in the UK a few years ago that their kitchen was never warm enough in the winter to have spreadable butter. She acted like this was a common issue, while I (an American) had never heard of this being a thing before.
I keep my house at about 68f/20c during the winter and had soft enough butter after not too long of a wait. But is this actually unusual? Do people spend all winter with torn and shredded toast from hard butter?
Anyways…my mother used to leave the butter dish on the kitchen table and the butter was always soft. I have never felt comfortable doing that for extended periods of time but we never died so I guess it’s good?
I did recently buy two different butter dishes (or containers, whatever they’re called). From Amazon. Each has a silicone seal ring around its lid. One container keeps butter in the fridge, and the other container stays out on the counter top. That one stays out and the butter inside does get soft and spreadable.
The one in the fridge has a clear top so you can see the butter inside it. The one on the countertop has a wooden lid and the container is ceramic.
We have one of those, too. In the winter months, the butter in there is at least somewhat spreadable, though not as easily as it is in the summer months, when the temperature in the kitchen is a few degrees warmer.
78F in the kitchen year-round. So yes, the butter is gloriously properly spreadable. Unlike what you’ll find in nearly every restaurant or other people’s residences.
Butter keeps far better at room temp than people think it will. Doubly so in a container that keeps the air mostly out.
Am I the only one who thinks that butter for bread should not be too spreadable? Butter in Europe seems to sometimes have something added so that it is spreadable even right out of the fridge. I don’t like it, I prefer my butter on my bread to have some texture.
That sounds cheap! I learned the word “koelkastsmeerbaar” (it is Dutch/Flamish meaning literally spreadable out of the cool box and I found it funny), that is the kind of butter I mean.
Living in Scotland, butter left out over night will be somewhere between easily spreadable and malleable with pressure in summer, and rock hard in winter.
Our previous solution was simply to keep tropical fish, as a butter dish left on top of the tank would yield admirably soft butter all year round. But the fish are no more. And so Santa will be bringing a heated butter dish, for which I have greater hopes than expectations.
I recently had our kitchen refitted and this is the first time in my life that I’ve had a kitchen with heating in it. I’m not sure if unheated kitchens are completely normal throughout the land, but that’s all I have ever known.
But the heating doesn’t run all day and night and so the kitchen is often too cold for butter to soften if left out. On toast, I apply it in thin slices and let the warmth of the toast melt it a bit, before spreading it around. I actually enjoy the cool little islands of remnants of unmelted butter mixed in amongst the warm melted parts and whatever else I spread on the toast (especially if it’s Marmite - that pretty much demands for some of the butter not to be soft, in my book).
Threads like this make me feel really old. I grew up in Texas in a house without air conditioning. If you left butter out during the summer it would actually melt. During the spring and fall it would stay together but turn rancid. To this day, my wife (who grew up in Ohio) can not understand why I insist on storing so many common food items in the refrigerator.
