- Brands of butter can differ majorly by salt content, American vs. European style, and even the wrapper.
- Doing a blind taste test, I was able to immediately pick out the butter my mom used to use growing up, so it was difficult to be objective about such a childhood-based ingredient.
- Overall, my top butter picks were Kerrygold’s Irish Butter and Finlandia for their strong flavors.
- Store-brand is not always a worse buy, but it was in this case.
Butter is everywhere, whether it’s the main ingredient in croissants and buttercream frosting or as the perfect topping to a piece of toast. It makes everything better, from cake to mashed potatoes, and even vegans love faux butter.
I love butter, but I don’t really have a go-to. I typically buy whatever’s on sale, so I set up a blind taste test between six salted kinds of butter to determine the best variety for eating.
All butters were purchased at a New York Shop Rite, and the store-brand package is the only one not sold nationwide. They were warmed on a stovetop (baker hack: if you need room-temperature butter for a recipe, place the stick on top of the stove while the oven heats up), and then spread on grocery store ciabatta and baked dutch yellow potatoes. I unwrapped all the butters and assigned them letters A-F so as not to know which was which.
Here’s a taste test between six top kinds of butter.
Kerrygold's Salted Butter was my favorite for flavor.
My first thought for the Kerrygold butter was "wow this has good flavor." It has a nice amount of salt and a richer butter flavor than some of the other brands.
It also had the strongest golden yellow color, which Kerrygold attributes to "the winds, rain, and warming influence of the Gulf Stream" on the grass that's eaten by the cows in Ireland. It tastes great if you're only going to use salted butter on a piece of bread or a baked potato. For cooking, it would most certainly lend a stronger flavor to savory foods and sweet baked goods.
The store-brand version was by far my least favorite.
Between the regular and the organic store-brand, I went with organic, hoping it might give this pick an edge. While some generic store-brand products can be just as good if not better than what they're imitating, this store-brand organic sweet cream salted butter was a miss in my book.
While this was not a great butter, if it wasn't tasted alongside five other competitors, I probably wouldn't have noticed its faults.
Land O'Lakes was very tasty, but faired better unmelted.
Known as "the very first sweet cream butter," this type comes from pasteurized fresh cream, rather than cultured or soured cream, and is the American standard as opposed to the European tradition.
This type of butter is definitely a crowd-pleaser. On bread, Land O' Lakes has a classic salty, buttery flavor. On a baked potato, I tasted salt before the flavor of potato. I went back and forth, but ultimately decided I thought this butter was a bit too much on the salty side for my taste.
Breakstone's all natural salted butter tasted like home.
I thought I could be objective, but when I had this with the baked potato, my first thought was "this tastes like my mom's baked potatoes" and surprise, this is the butter she always used when I was growing up.
It has a lovely, but slightly bland flavor, so it's perfect to use on bread if you're also adding jam or a dip on top. Because this taste is so linked in my memory to my mom's cooking, I can't trust that it's any better than any other butter when it came to the baked potatoes.
Finlandia has a strong butter taste.
If you like to eat butter on its own, the most butter-tasting butter was Finlandia. The salt is not particularly sharp, but it's quite good. Finlandia's butter comes from milk on family-owned farms in Finland where "the cows are treated humanely and not given rBST or any artificial hormones," according to the company.
This European-style butter might be good for cooking, but it is absolutely perfect with a good crusty bread.
Kate's Homemade Butter uses sea salt to achieve a strong salty flavor.
With the most unique packaging, Kate's butter uses sea salt to make a delicious butter. The company says it uses pasteurized cream from New England dairy farms to churn butter slowly in small batches.
Unfortunately, on bread, I got a strong salty flavor followed by a delicious buttery flavor and wished they both hit my palette at the same time. It's got a really nice butter flavor, but I wanted it to be more forward than the salt.
For what it's worth, it was the only one wrapped in aluminum foil which, according to Cooking Light, is superior to parchment paper for keeping butter fresher longer.
There's no denying some butters, like Kerrygold's Irish Butter and Finlandia, were better than others.
Butter taste-tests will always be subjective because the butter that was used in your family's home is always going to get a few extra points.
That said, Kerrygold's Irish Butter and Finlandia were my favorite brands of butter I tested for this experiment.
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