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I love butter — so much so that I often consider bread and butter my desert island food. But until I wrote this article, I didn’t really have a go-to brand; I just bought whatever sticks were on sale. I thought, with only two ingredients (cream and salt), how different can they really be? Turns out the answer is very.
All butter is not created equal and it can be almost impossible to tell which ones are best just by reading the label. So I tasted a variety of different butter brands that are readily available at grocery stores nationwide to find out which store-bought sticks are the crème de la crème — and worthy of any desert island feast.
The Tasters
It didn’t take much arm-twisting to convince my wife to help me with this particular taste test. The amount of extra butter she adds to food like boxed mac and cheese, French toast, and mashed potatoes would make Paula Deen proud, y’all.
The Methodology
I selected nine different brands of butter from the grocery store that are available in stick form. Every brand offered a salted and unsalted version, and we tried the salted version of each. Before tasting, we let all of the contestants come to room temperature and then slathered generous pats on hunks of good crusty bread. We judged each butter on flavor, texture, and spreadability. These are the butters that stick out from the rest.
The Results
Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter
This was the butteriest butter of all the butters. Churned from milk produced by grass-fed Irish cows, Kerrygold’s Pure Irish Butter is European style, which means it has a higher fat content (82%) than American-style butter (80%). Because fat equals flavor, this butter is noticeably richer and more flavorful than your average store-bought sticks. Plus, it spreads like a dream. We did find it to be a little bit saltier than the others, so I’d recommend using the unsalted version for baking.
Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter
This butter is also European style, containing 82% butterfat. The sea-salted version is my new favorite for spackling on bread. It had the most complex flavor profile of all the butters we tried, thanks to the brand’s extra step in the butter-making process: Vermont Creamery adds live cultures to fresh Vermont cream to ferment overnight before churning. The result is a silky smooth, highly spreadable butter that’s deliciously tangy with subtle hazelnut notes.
Tillamook Extra Creamy Butter
I’m a big fan of Tillamook ice cream, so I was excited to try the butter from this Oregon-based dairy brand. This butter is made with sea salt, contains 81% butterfat, and as promised on the label, is indeed extra creamy. It had a really nice mouthfeel, a clean aftertaste, and all of the sweet, salty, and savory notes were in balance. Overall, we thought Tillamook was an all-around champ and a great all-purpose butter to keep stocked in your fridge.
Horizon Organic Butter
This organic butter begins with milk produced by pasture-raised, grass-fed cows from certified organic family farms across the U.S. And whatever greens those cows are grazing on are definitely making a positive impact on the flavor of this American-style butter (with 80% butterfat). While we found most other American-style butters we tasted to be a bit one-dimensional, this butter delivers big time on flavor. It’s got a slight savoriness, making it an excellent choice for cooking.
PHOTO CREDIT:
Photography: Paul Quitoriano
Art Direction: Sarah Ceniceros Gomez
