Reader Julie sent me an email last night about how she’s created her own spreadable butter.
She writes:
I put an end to buttery spreads in our home recently because they don’t get cheap enough and I can’t pronounce half the ingredients included. Then after 2 weeks I was really wishing there was some middle ground on it all because I kept mangling my son’s morning toasttrying to spread stick butter on it. So, I did a little experiment andso far it looks and tastes just fine!
Here is her recipe:
:: 2 sticks of unsalted butter
:: 1/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil
:: 1/4 cup of water
:: Salt
She then softened the butter in the microwave and put all the ingredients in the food processor. You could also use a blender or mixer. Then she whipped the mixture together for a few minutes, poured it into a container, and placed it in the fridge.
Julie writes that it solidified but was very spreadable.
What a smart idea, Julie! Thank you for sharing. What convenience food items have you made from scratch?
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s a nice recipe and it probably healthier with the oil added to it, since liquid fats are healthier than saturated fats.
But I don’t really understand the need. Butter – real butter – doesn’t require refrigeration. It is perfectly safe to leave butter at room temperature. Just store it in a butter dish in your cupboard, then it will always be soft. You can easily store a single stick of butter at room temp for a month or more with no problem, but I assume with most families, a stick of butter wouldn’t last the week before being consumed.
If you’re super concerned about food safety (even though there is no harm leaving butter in a simple dish) you could always get a butter crock or butter boat or a butter keeper, which uses water to seal out air.
You can be sure that our ancestors never stored butter in a fridge and it seems that only Americans are trained to do so. Or if you have a wine fridge, you could keep the butter in there – it’s not as cold as a regular fridge.
I read up on it once and don’t remember where I found the information but learned that salted butter is OK to leave out at room temperature because the salt acts as a preservative but that unsalted butter should be kept in a refrigerator. Since the stick butter I buy is mostly for baking, I buy unsalted and didn’t trust that my new spreadable butter was appropriately salted in order to be preserved, it was more for flavor. We actually don’t use a whole lot of butter anyway except for baking so it could easily take us at least a month to go through a stick of butter.
Will definitely try this–so much more appetizing than the storebought stuff. Thank you…
We use unsalted butter and leave it out on the counter. We’ve done it for years, ever since my food-safety-paranoid, registered-dietician mother-in-law said that SHE does it! It’s so much nicer and we’ve never had a problem.
If you add 1 teaspoon of liquid lecithin it is a better consistency.