What Is Butter and How Can I Use It?

Butter rewards a little know-how: how to choose it, cook it, store it, and substitute in a pinch. Browse 14,585 recipes to cook with it.

What is butter?

Butter is cream churned until the fat separates from the buttermilk, then worked into a solid block. By US standard it is at least 80 percent milkfat; the rest is water and milk solids, and those two minor players explain most of butter's behavior in a pan.

More than 14,000 recipes on Recipeland use it, which makes it worth knowing properly.

One stick is ½ cup, 8 tablespoons, 4 ounces, or 113 grams. Most American recipes measure in sticks, so tape that conversion inside a cabinet door if you cook from international recipes.

How to Cook With It

For baking, use unsalted and add your own salt. Salt content in salted butter varies by brand, roughly ¼ teaspoon per stick, which is enough to throw off a cookie dough you have otherwise measured carefully.

Creaming is where cookies are won or lost. The butter should be cool room temperature, around 65°F (18°C), so it traps air when beaten with sugar; the technique behind Peanut Butter Kiss Cookies and most drop cookies.

On the stove, the milk solids are the limit. They start to burn around 350°F (175°C), so butter alone is wrong for hard searing. Add a splash of neutral oil, or clarify the butter to remove the solids and raise its ceiling.

Those same solids are also the payoff. Cook butter past its foaming stage and they toast into brown butter, which smells like hazelnuts and improves nearly any cookie or pan sauce it touches.

Where It Earns Its Place

Butter carries flavor in two directions. It rounds off acidic and bitter edges in pan sauces, and it spreads aromatics, garlic, herbs, spices, evenly through a dish.

Whisked cold into a warm sauce, it emulsifies into gloss and body. That trick, mounted butter, is most of what makes restaurant pan sauces feel rich, and the same emulsion logic drives Lemon Butter Mousse.

The brown butter failure mode is speed. After the foam subsides, the solids go from toasted to burnt in well under a minute. Pull the pan at the color of hazelnut shells and pour the butter out; the residual heat keeps cooking it.

European-style butter, 82 to 85 percent fat, has less water. Pastry made with it is flakier because less steam disrupts the layers, and it browns with less spitting. For croissants and pie crust I think it is worth the extra cost; for a weeknight sauté it is not.

Swapping It Out

For sautéing, olive oil or ghee covers the function and loses the dairy flavor. Ghee is butter with the water and milk solids already removed, so it sears at temperatures that would burn whole butter.

For baking, solid coconut oil or plant-based butters mimic the texture work, though flavor and browning both change. Shortening makes tender cookies but contributes nothing in taste.

If you only have salted butter for a baking recipe, use it and cut the added salt by ¼ teaspoon per stick. That correction lands close enough for everything except delicate pastry.

Buying and Keeping It

Check the fat content rather than the marketing. "European-style" on the label should mean 82 percent or more; some store brands hit the same number for less money.

In the fridge, butter keeps for one to three months past its date but absorbs neighboring odors readily, so leave it wrapped and away from the onions. Frozen and well sealed, it holds for up to a year.

Salted butter can sit a few days in a covered dish on the counter for spreading; the salt slows spoilage and soft butter spreads without tearing bread. Unsalted is better kept cold.

Types of butter

Specific kinds of butter and the recipes that use them.

Unsalted butter

Butter is a dairy product made by churning fresh or fermented cream. It is generally used as a spread and a condiment, as well as in cooking applications, such as baking, sauce making, and pan frying. Butter consists of butterfat, water and milk proteins.

Most frequently made from cows' milk, butter can also be manufactured from the milk of other mammals, including sheep, goats, buffalo, and yaks. Salt, flavorings and preservatives are sometimes added to butter. Rendering butter produces clarified butter or ghee, which is almost entirely butterfat.

Butter generally has a pale yellow color, but varies from deep yellow to nearly white. Its unmodified color is dependent on the animals' feed and is commonly manipulated with food colorings in the commercial manufacturing process, most commonly annatto or carotene.

Ghee (clarified butter)

Ghee is butter that has been simmered until the water boils off and the milk solids brown and drop out, leaving pure golden butterfat.

It is the Indian cousin of clarified butter, with one key difference. The solids are cooked longer, until they toast, which is what gives ghee its deep nutty aroma.

Strip out the water and the milk solids and you change two things about butter. It keeps for months without refrigeration, and it stops burning at the low temperature that limits whole butter on the stove.

A jar of golden ghee

Liquid butter flavoring

Liquid butter flavoring is a concentrated extract that delivers the taste of butter without the butter. A few drops carry the warm, creamy, slightly nutty note of fresh butter into a batter or a bowl of popcorn, with no added fat.

Most bottles are an imitation flavor built around diacetyl and related aroma compounds, the same molecules that make real butter smell like butter. They come suspended in either a water and alcohol base or an oil base.

It is potent stuff, sold in small bottles for a reason.

Butter buds

Butter Buds are dried, butter-flavored granules you sprinkle or dissolve into food to get a buttery taste with almost none of the fat. They come from the low-fat cooking wave of the 1980s.

The granules are made mostly from maltodextrin carrying the flavor of cultured, enzyme-treated butter. A packet is meant to be mixed with hot water and stirred into a dish, not melted in a pan.

There is no real fat to brown or fry in. Think of it as butter flavor rather than butter.

One packet typically replaces the taste of a few tablespoons of butter while adding only a few calories.