I am fond of my Butter Bell

I have the same model and love it. Been using it for 6 years now.

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Ha! Well, you’re spared the spousal fights of “It’s too cold in here, turn the A/C off.” “No, it’s hot, turn it colder” and so forth.

Where the livin’s easy, the fish are jumping, and the cotton’s high.

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“Summertime, and the livin’s easy…” :musical_note:

Lana, just like butter.

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Same here. We use a Rubbermaid container, works great. We’ve left it on the counter before going on vacation for a couple of weeks and it’s fine when we come back. You don’t need anything fancy, unless the way it looks matters to you.

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Never seen this before. But I just got my own butter dish a few months ago - and gasp - did you guys know butter comes in different shaped sticks based on where you live??

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"Butter used to be sold in one pound blocks, wrapped in parchment paper and packaged in a cardboard box, until 1906, when a big buyer of butter from a restaurant in New Orleans asked if the butter company could sell butter in packs of four quarter-pound sticks rather than one big lump. They obliged, and the sticks were a hit. At the time, the town of Elgin, Illinois was known as the Butter Capital of the World, home to the famous Elgin Butter Company since 1871. It was with their Elgin Butter Cutter that the East Coast butter size was determined, according to a 1948 paper on the packaging of butter, and that’s how the name Elgin stick was derived.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that the West Coast really got into the butter making game, as reporter Tommy Andres explained on APM’s Marketplace. According to John Bruhn, former director of the Dairy Research and Information Center at the University of California, Davis, “…the size of the cube you see is a result of newer equipment purchased at the time to package the butter.” And that difference has stuck, so much so that even Minnesota-based Land O’ Lakes makes butter in both sizes and ships it out regionally." -MyRecipes

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Ah, that makes sense - the picture shows the bell filled to the top, but I suppose the idea would be to not have that actually occur.

Along with @ClutchLinkey’s comments on “spillage” I may well have to give one of these a try :slight_smile:

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The photo on the article is not best practice, I never load mine full of butter, but just fill the top of the bell so the water and butter never kiss.

In Wisconsin summers the butter stays put, but I’ve heard that butter evaporates in Texas heat so YMMV.

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Yeah, I looked it up after learning this. Never knew!

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You need to change the water and clean things occasionally. The water is mostly there to keep the butter cool, but also basically cuts the butter itself off from air to limit the chance of rancidity and off odors getting to it.

Thing is though that butter is fine, and perfectly safe at room temp even in an uncovered dish. The moisture content of butter is low enough that mold and what have aren’t generally a concern. And fat is pretty stable at room temp. Rancidity and off flavors aren’t a problem if you move through butter at a reasonable pace.

Butter is usually kept room temp outside the US, most often without a butter bell. Most of my Irish family uses uncovered plates or bowls. Stick them in the cabinet to keep dust and bugs away.

Where temps are warmer that’s where the butter bell comes in handy, cause it’ll keep the butter from melting. Ceramic is also popular if you are not in Texas.

I use a stainless steel double walled butter dish. It keeps things from melting just as well as a butter bell. But it’s less complicated and messy. Our butter doesn’t liquify unless we have temps in the 90s for a couple days straight. In which case we fridge the thing at night and the butter thermos keeps thing cool through the day.

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Sometimes shorter packs show up here on the East Coast and eventually into my fridge. It’s always a little strange to be confronted with a different size stick o’butter.

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I used to just keep it in a covered butter dish on the counter, and it seemed to keep well enough.

I grew up with a lot of Irish butter around. So always been intimately familiar.

In Europe sticks are generally a 1/2lb and sort of rounded, like a bar of soap. Bit shorter than the long US sticks too. We use it often enough our butter dish is euro butter style, shaped to fit the Kerrygold puck, and more of a butter pot with lid than the covered plate style.

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In our house with a cat who jumps onto the counters when we’re not looking and knocks things over (or off), the most stable common butter dish seems like a safer choice.

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A few people mentioned Irish butter and then part of the post devolved into gushing about one particular brand - Kerrygold?

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It’s the major Irish brand, and the only one available widely in the US.

It’s pretty damn good butter. But its very trendy right now because grass fed butter will save your soul or something.

Fine by me. We used to have a cousin mail it to us. Otherwise it was a 2 hour trip to an expat store. Now i can get it at my regular grocery.

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Kerrigold makes a “soft” spread version of their salted butter just FYI.

Yup. The butter in my fridge looks like this.

It’s always fun to watch when people discover those small cultural differences.

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Presumably Mark is still fond of his butter bell 5 years later.

But as a poster noted at the link, the water seal seems to just add problems rather than solve them since we can form airtight seals with other kinds seals that don’t encourage mold. A quick Google didn’t show up any confirmation that butter bells actually preserve butter any better than just an ordinary container. I’m not saying that absence of evidence is proof that they don’t work rather I would love it if someone could provide sound evidence that they do. Without such evidence I don’t find the sales pitch for butter bells to be very convincing given the inconvenience of having to change messy water every few days.

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Advice on this? If I walk, I slide all over the place and lose my balance, but swimming also doesn’t get me very far.

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