Making a better butter knife

boing
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mind-blown/head-melts

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Iā€™ve had two butter bells, and every time I wind up with moldy butter because I am human and get busy and donā€™t change the water. Or (as the article you linked mention) my house gets warm and suddenly my butter is all like WHOO BEACH DAY.

So if you are a lazy bastard like me, you probably should not use a butter bell.

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I see the knife is invented by Australians. Yeah, butter bells wonā€™t work in a good Aussie summer. I suppose I could keep the butter bell in the fridgeā€¦

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Soften the stick of butter in the microwave and stop fussing with unitasking cutlery.

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yeah, i see what you did there. that unnecessary kitchen pot conveniently obscures whatever apparatus is beneath it.

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TAKE MY MONEY. Oh wait. they can take my money.

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but adding a grater to a butter knife is adding tasks to cutlery you already have; itā€™s the opposite of uni-tasking! iā€™m not saying there arenā€™t possible downsides, but i think iā€™m down with this if itā€™s reasonably priced (it wonā€™t be).

anyway, a microwave is the ultimate in unitasking; all it does even passably is reheat things! and donā€™t even try to tell me that it can pop popcorn; really, just donā€™t even get me started. i use my microwave as a storage shelf.

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Oh, you got me! Thereā€™s a midget under there, with a magnet.

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Now youā€™ve just introduced another layer of uncertainty.

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I think if you moved a magnet fast enough under the pot, the induced current would cause the pot to heat up.

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31

I keep my butter liquid by keeping it inside my Steorn perpetual energy machine.

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32

If you live in a relatively warm climate, I would think that one should be able to make a simple unglazed ceramic container that could be cooled through evaporation of water ā€“ probably keeping the butter in a nice firm-ish state.

Edit: a small version of this: Pot-in-pot refrigerator

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Yet another tool of right-handed oppression. You people will stop at nothing to keep us sinister-handed folks down.

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I noticed that too!

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Patent Pending: Pfooti.

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Personally, almost all the butter I use is in cooking, so I can safely keep it in the fridge. I buy it at Costco, so I typically have 1 lb each of salted and unsalted in the fridge, and a few more of each in the freezer. For toast and such I use the tubs of whipped, spreadable butter (yes I know, not as tasty, I use it anyway - I bake my own bread, it has plenty of flavor already).

This knife seems to need you to have your stick of butter fully unwrapped, which means youā€™re probably keeping it in a butter dish anyway, in which case why not keep it out of the fridge?

I still love the George Carlin bit (now dated, because energy conservation) about refrigerators with built-in heated butter warmers.

I think the people who think it is a safety issue get thrown by ā€œadviceā€ like this: http://challengedairy.com/tips-and-techniques/refrigerating-butter

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Fascinating! When the hummus recipe says to refrigerate overnight for best results, I always wondered how they handled that step in (for example) the Levant, pre-refrigeration.

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Oh, no, according to my mom who saw a sensationalist local-news ā€œconsumer alertā€ sometime in the 1980ā€™s, unrefrigerated butter is a DEADLY KILLER!!!111!!1

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which brings up the bigger point of being able to run ANY knife under hot water to heat it up BEFORE you butterā€¦smooth as butter. same trick works for ice cream scoopers. no special tools or rocket science needed.

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