I’ve never heard of the concept but that sounds amazing!
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I have heard of wild onions and garlic being problematic for cows to graze on, as they can lead to oniony or garlicky milk. Which would be terrible in your coffee, but I wonder if that method of flavoring could be harnessed for good.
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But the “standard danger zone” is meaningless if you don’t apply it to specific foods.
A loaf of bread? Uncooked vegetables? A jar of peanut butter? A bottle of oil? All of those obviously have much longer than four-hour shelf life.
Butter is much closer to the bottle of oil example, having very little liquid water in it. A stick of butter can safely stay on the counter for a week or more.
My point is that the article acknowledges the long shelf life, by describing how in the rest of the world most people don’t refrigerate their butter, but also states that butter outside the fridge is only safe for four hours, and ignores the contradiction.
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… and it’s about two or three points for weight watchers, as long as you don’t go overboard on the butter.
(2 saltines, 1/2 tbsp butter, and 1 tsp honey)
Gonna have to try that out this afternoon for snack time…
The food regulations are generally very conservative, and are intended for commercial kitchens; IIRC, butter is treated as a dairy product in that regard and is the root for that.
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I had the same thought, but a different link in mind.
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I have mentioned here before, i grew up on a goat dairy. can confirm that what they graze on will affect their milk. certain times of the year, we had to keep the goats out of some areas where bitter weeds grew because it would make the milk taste bad. this is why we fed them sweet clover and alfalfa as well as molasses covered “sweet feed” grain. made for very good milk, yogurt, cheese and (my favorite!) ice cream.
we did not make butter, however, due to the fact that goat’s milk is more homogeneous - the fat molecules are smaller and harder to separate the cream from the milk in order to make butter.
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So that’s why it’s so difficult to find goat butter!
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It’s promoted as the new charcuterie board.
Just clarifying where the four hour time limit probably came from. I could have gone into much greater detail about what kinds of foods, how they are kept, etc., buy you didn’t seem to be asking about that.
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Because if my autistic ass did this they’d send me to therapy for atypical or maladaptive behaviors surrounding food. But enough neurotypicals do it and its a trend. We’ll be over here with our dino chicken nuggets judging the hell out of this.
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Only 4 hours? We refrigerate the extra sticks, but we have a dish with butter that’s permanently left out. Purely anecdotal, but we’ve never had an issue. It did turn from a stick to a puddle during the last CA heat wave though.
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Kinda fun how big scary dinosaurs evolved into chickens and then we smoosh them up and make them back into dinosaur shapes again, huh?
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Butter bell to the rescue!
We used to get the melting sometimes in the summer even here when we used a standard butter dish, but this seems to prevent it. And the water seal keeps the butter nice and fresh in the summer, when it used to get a little “tired” by the time we’d use up a whole stick.
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Thanks for the suggestion!
Coming soon to the boingboing store. 
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boingboing gotchu
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Lol!
I was only joshin’ with that comment!
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The other day when I was picking up some groceries I noticed that my local Wegmans had integrated the fancy butter and the regular butter, moving the fancy stuff out of the cheese department and in with the regular dairy section. And right next to the empty space where I was disappointed by the lack of Amish roll butter I saw a package of goat butter for the first time in my life.
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Define ‘normal’.
It’s the empty set. Maybe that’s why it okay to characterize them.
