Fresh butter, easy to spread and sandwich ready, and lots of it more, is a good thing for any fridge.
I don't use a lot of butter in my house but when I do, I like to have it fresh, of course, and easy to spread.
I always keep a good amount of butter in my refrigerator so that I don't suddenly run out of it and I never know when I might need it. Sometimes I don't need it for weeks because I might want to use other things in my food like olive or sesame or some other oils, or I might favor some natural mayonnaise for a while or soy sauce and tomato sauce.
Having enough butter on hand if I want to bake some fatty cookies is important also.
If I used butter every day, to always have it soft, sandwich ready and easy to spread I could keep a small piece on the counter, outside of the refrigerator at room temperature but that is not an option because that piece would stand a good chance to go rancid long before I would get to it again.
The simple solution for this situation is to keep all my butter in the freezer except for a small piece that I put in a plastic container with a lid and keep it in the fridge. The container I use is the one I actually reuse, it initially contained some other food that came in it from the food market. It turns out to be just perfect for butter, the glass could possibly get scratched or chipped by the knife.
The important thing here is to cut the butter into small cubes before putting it in the freezer so that a small piece could be taken out whenever needed.
Also this way I can save some money by buying the butter in a bigger size package. It is cheaper per oz or gram and the butter stays good and fresh in the freezer for a really long time.
Another good part in all this, and this is actually the best part besides everything else, that by cutting butter into small cubes/ portions and keeping it in the fridge in that size pieces it makes it very easy to use and spread. It almost instantly gets soft when you take it out of the refrigerator because of the piece's small size. If you want it really soft you only need to wait for a very short time before it gets to that state. A bigger piece would take much longer and you'd stay hungry and angry at that butter that would not be sandwich ready and crumble instead of spreading.
The picture bellow has the butter on it that is left from a 1 lb brick of butter on it's original wrapper and it's kept in the freezer in the same wrapping paper it came in. You can cut the butter right on that paper - less mess, wrap it back and put it in a plastic bag, it keeps the cubes together neatly and they are still easy to separate when frozen.
pic: Butter cut into cubes before being put in the freezer.
pic: Soft small cubes of butter in the plastic container that is kept in the refrigerator.
This butter keeping technique is as simple as it is useful.
Amazingly, it serves not one but 4 purposes:
1. Save money on butter
2. Keep butter always fresh
3. Always have a sandwich ready piece of butter
4. Always have lots of butter to bake the fattest cookies you might desire
And now it's time to go make that perfectly buttery sandwich with some whole wheat bread, nutmeg and... nothing else really. Hibiscus tea comes along with it. Or Green tea - that's always welcome too.
in this post: keep butter always fresh easy to spread on sandwich making butter cubes save money by buying big packages of butter using refrigerator freezer plastic containers knife
