Serious bakers, we know you want the very best butter for your recipes. We tested the most popular brands to find it.
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When you take baking as seriously as our Test Kitchen team does, you inevitably start to get into the most minute details regarding ingredients. In our kitchens at Taste of Home HQ, it’s not uncommon to hear our pros debating the pros and cons of canned pumpkin or different techniques for making the flakiest biscuits.
One of the hottest topics in our Test Kitchen, though, is which brand makes the best butter.
Butter is the backbone of so many baking recipes, so using the most delicious brand is crucial for successful bakes. So what’s the very best? Our culinary team put nine brands to the test.
Butter keeps well in the fridge, but can you freeze butter?
What Our Test Kitchen Looks for in the Best Butter
Butter is an incredibly difficult ingredient to judge. With just two ingredients—cream and salt—it’s more challenging to decipher the subtle differences between brands. It all comes down to the proportion of salt to cream and the quality of the dairy itself. Of course, our Test Kitchen was up to the challenge. When searching for the best butter, our experts considered the following:
Texture: Is the butter creamy and smooth? Does it spread well over bread?
Flavor: Does the butter have the right level of salt? Is it too salty for salted butter? Are there any other qualities worth noting?
Appearance: How does the butter look? Is it more yellow or white?
Our Test Kitchen-Preferred Butter Brands
In this deliciously rich test, four brands rose to the top. These butters are the crème de la crème.
Best Butter for Everyday: Land O Lakes Salted Butter
Tkpf21 Butter Landolakes E07 27 6b
On its own, Land O Lakes butter was perfectly satisfying. The dairy used in this butter gave it a luscious flavor and texture that would make it a welcome addition for every mashed potato recipe or on top of a steaming hot baked potato or a great base for flavored compound butter.
Since Land O Lakes is readily available anywhere you do your grocery shopping and works well in any application, our Test Kitchen had to call this the best everyday butter.
Price: $3.89 per pound
Price per ounce: $0.24
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Best European-Style Butter: Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter
Tkpf21 Butter Kerrygold E07 27 5b 1
This blind taste test proved to our Test Kitchen that Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter is worth all the hype. With higher butterfat content than most mass-market butter brands, Kerrygold delivered big time on flavor and texture.
Before our testers even tasted this butter, they knew there was something different about it. Kerrygold has a buttercup yellow hue that looks tempting, like the kind of butter you can’t wait to spread over an English muffin or slice of banana bread. This distinctive hue is thanks to the grass the dairy cows enjoy.
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