I tried one of those and got a lot of moldy butter despite changing the water often. I went to a conventional glass butter dish with a tight fitting lid, and leave the wax paper on as much as feasible. I hardly ever get mold. Here are some possible explanations:
Putting the butter into it requires exposing new surface area that wouldn’t be exposed with conventional butter dishes, and of course you can’t leave the wax paper on to keep it from the air.
Mold likes water
The water may distribute any mold more efficiently into nooks and crannies.
The knife that you spread with contaminates random and often large swaths, as opposed to only contaminating the next-to-be-used portion in stick form.
There were always air pockets
Keeping the water level correct is nontrivial because you have to eyeball the right level without being able to see if you are correct when it’s closed.
The earthenware surface has more microscopic surface irregularities.
The shape is harder to clean and has more surface area than a flat butter dish so I didn’t clean it quite as often.
Basically, there’s no good reason I can figure why the water would give a better seal than a properly fitting lid.
When the weather gets hot I have to put the butter in the fridge anyway. Since I always toast my bread I just put a pat of cold butter on after the halogen toaster oven has finished, and in less than a minute it’s melted perfectly. For baking the microwave at low level makes a nice liquid that’s easier to stir.
here in central texas there are about three months where a butter bell can be used… the rest of the year it just plops into the water. i simply keep it in a glass butter dish on the counter. much less annoying.
We just got one of these around Xmas. My wife had wanted one for ages. So far it’s working great. No mold, even though our SoCal house has had plenty of toasty days this winter (it hit the low 80s today).
Before refrigerators got all super effecient, some of them were designed with no insulation behind the butter compartment on the door, so that compartment would be warmer (and the butter easier to spread).
same here. we have the same one mark shows, but in red. worked great for awhile, but then it got moldy. i realized that maybe it’s also super important to keep the toast crumbs out of it, but i still haven’t gone back to it. now i just blend two sticks of room temp butter with 1/3C olive oil and store it in the fridge. the olive oil helps make it spread easier, and i can’t tell the taste difference.
“Would that still be an issue if you’re using the butter to cook with?”
Yes, for two reasons. Some of the bacteria may give off bad flavors, which won’t hurt you but, well, taste and smell bad. (There hasn’t been much research done on foodborne bacteria that doesn’t cause illness.) And, while some foodborne microorganisms give you an infection, making you ill like e.coli or salmonella, some produce toxins as a waste product -heat kills the organism but does nothing to affect the poisonous waste material.
Protip: Since refrigeration is now a thing, get a butter dish. Taking this thing out a bit before you need it and putting it back at the end of the meal/day is a far lazier approach IMO.
They will do that and once they do, you’ll never be able to leave it out again. Damn cats.
I’m not an expert on fine cooking but so much of fine cooking involves having butter at a particular temperature (generally room temperature unless you’re making pastries or clarified butter) and butter is so hard to get to room temperature without letting it just do its thing in a room that I find this fairly hard to believe.
Not to be “that person” but do you have any links on this?
Mark, I love you man, but really? Because air is what causes bacterial to spontaneously generate? I think Pasteur already looked into this one…
I worked in food service for a while, where I got certified as a food safety manager, which hardly qualifies me as an expert, but this is a major no-no. Don’t get me wrong, I take all sorts of risks with food at home, but I don’t pretend that it’s not a risk.
Rubbish, I’ve worked in many kitchens that leave the butter out at room temperature and only refrigerate it at night. They’re all still open, none were ever shut down following a food safety audit, and the butter always remained unrefrigerated during the audits. Australia, where I’m from is renowned for having pretty damn strict food safety guidelines and enforcement as well.
I keep the butter in a butter dish on the table. Almost never have a problem, except if it’s exceptionally hot in the summer it gets too soft. (We normally get a week or two of 90F, but it still cools down to 60 or colder at night, so the house stays cooler than that.)
The cats are trained not to jump on the table or kitchen counters (though if I were going away for a couple of days I’d put it away, to prevent temptation, and we do keep the chairs pushed in to avoid being too inviting.)
[quote=“stefanjones, post:22, topic:51202, full:true”]
This looks like one of those gadgets I’d look for at Goodwill. $27 is a lot of money.
[/quote]And they’re quite common in thrift stores, IME, because that’s where most of 'em end up after about the second or third time the butter grows fuzzy mold. (-:
[quote=“simonize, post:25, topic:51202”]
no insulation behind the butter compartment on the door, so that compartment would be warmer (and the butter easier to spread).
[/quote]When I was a kid, our refrigerator had a butter compartment that had a metal platform and a slide switch labeled “SOFT - FIRM”. Setting it in the ‘soft’ position turned on a small heating element in the metal platform.
(We never used it - my mother preferred “soft margarine” that came in tubs that didn’t fit the butter compartment, anyway.)
Every restaurant I have worked in kept butter in a fridge, one place that had pats out on the counter held them on ice. What’s the name and location of this place with butter just out on the tables?
Here’s the USDA guideline:
“Store in original protective wrapping or container until ready for use. Freeze butter not intended for use within 2 or 3days. Frozen butter will maintain its quality for 2 months. For “ready spreadability” keep a few days’ supply in the regular portion of the refrigerator. Remove 10 to 15 minutes before use.” http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/getfile?dDocName=STELDEV3002487
Note that they do not recommend keeping it in the fridge for more than a few days.
Also note that the grade of butter affects spreadability.
Yep, we use a “French” butter holder for a few years now. I works very well indeed. Though we are lucky here in SF that our average temperature is 65 degrees and even butter on a plate keeps well but is messy. The crock is very neat and the butter is protected from its surroundings. No bugs or kittens can get into it.
This leads me to a thought. What about a styrofoam box for butter storage in-the-fridge, with small resistive heaters inside to keep it a bit warmer? Could also be connected to a timer, so in the morning you have a just-right butter ready.
I’ve got sad news for you. Every restaurant in the world does this with their butter. Whether in the kitchen or to keep butter for service spreadable. Its not, as far as I know, a health code violation. Or generally considered a risk. I’ve certainly never been cited for it. And let me point out that in New York State hollow stirrers are banned, as they count as unwrapped straws. And unwrapped straws/stirrers kill babies. But only if they’re hollow. If those mother fuckers are solid you can spray them down with Ebola for all the health department cares, TOTALLY SAFE. They don’t even check the damn things outside of checking their solidity.
The danger zone isn’t a universal. I doesn’t apply to foods below a certain water content, above a certain salt or acid content, fermented or cultured in certain ways, or that have been suitably pasteurized etc. Hence beef jerky, duck confit, pickles, dry cured hams, cheese and the like. Butter is 20% percent water sure, but that other 80% is generally not made up of things bacteria want to eat. And fat is interesting stuff. It can be used it preserve and protect other foods from contamination (as in confit and those dry cured hams) because bacteria and molds don’t like to live there, and because they do a damn good job of sealing things away from air and other contaminants. The biggest risk (and really only one to worry about) of contamination with fats is actually in storing things like garlic in/under fat without a suitable acid level. Garlic can harbor botulinum spores and provides all the stuff bacteria like to grow in that fat doesn’t. Botulinum also likes to grow in exactly the sort of oxygen free (anaerobic) environment than you create when you store things under fat.
As for your fears of rancid fats and cancer. First your going to taste rancidity before you smell it. Unless you let that stuff get really rancid between now and the last time you tasted it. But generally speaking any and all fats are going to contain at least some small, trace amount of oxidized fats (that’s yer rancidity right there). That includes, unfortunately, all those fats your body is making right now as a necessary part of being a living creature. Unless your cooking/eating fats were some how created, packaged, stored, and used in a vacuum or other suitably oxygen free environment then at some point they’ve been exposed to oxygen. Which means some of the fat molecules are oxidized. Which is what we mean by rancid. As far as I know even noticeably rancid oils contain really small concentrations of actual oxidized molecules You’re living in fear of trace amounts of very common compounds, compounds that are naturally and inexorably produced by existing. Because in very large concentrations they increase cancer risk in a petri dish full of cultured cells. In all reality you could likely chug a whole gallon jug of really rancid olive oil and not appreciably increase your risk of cancer. And if you’re really that concerned/afraid of the concept I have some very bad news about bananas.
Damn cats. 
