We taste-tested eleven brands of unsalted butter you’re likely to find at your local supermarket. To find the very best one, we sampled each without knowing which. Our winner is Vital Farms Unsalted Butter, but we also crowned two worthy runner-ups.
You don’t need me to sit here and tell you why butter is good and important, do you? I don’t have the energy, you don’t have the time, and we all already have 17 sticks of the stuff waiting for us when we get home. I don’t mean to imply I—or you—get home from a very exhausting day and nibble through a butter bar or 17 butter bars just to feel something, but should that be the case, you know deeply why butter is good and important…and why it’s so important to stock yourself up with good butter.
And so, as we are wont to do, the SE team has pulled together 11 brands of unsalted butter that you’re likely to find in your local supermarket, and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best. And we loved every minute of doing it!
The Criteria
Butter’s smell should be good. Suggestions of grass, cream, and far-away movie theaters are all nice things. Whiffs of oil, acid, and nearby movie theaters are significantly less nice. All the above applies to taste as well. Nature: good! Not nature: oy!
As for the color of butter, this team went in convinced they could identify Kerrygold from a rocket ship (in a good and comforting way) because of its signature yellow color, so we aimed to eliminate this variable from the taste test itself in order to determine what actually tasted the best. All this to say: I spent a very long time giggling in the test kitchen galley attempting to spread equal 1/4-inch layers of 11 different butters onto many, many salt-free saltines and then flipping them upside down into little communal bowls while Slacking “do NOT look through the holes of the saltines when tasting—this is a serious taste test!!” at my coworkers frantically. (Credit where it’s due: Our new senior social media editor Kelli very graciously helped me spread butter after she saw me struggling. Don’t worry—she did not see the key to the test and did ultimately test sight unseen.) It turns out this team enjoys all colors of unsalted butter!
Also worth noting: There should be nary a hindrance to using an unsalted butter, whether that be for baking, for greasing, or for, well, buttering. You should be able to unwrap it, dip into, and spread it with ease. It shouldn’t take physical effort or dexterity to evenly coat your desired surface with the stuff. In order to gauge each sample’s true spreadability, we let the blocks sit out at room temperature for just over three hours. By the time we sampled, each of the 11 butters measured temps somewhere between 57-62 degrees.
This! wasn’t! easy! No, stop! It wasn’t! If you say you like butter so much, you try eating back-to-back pats of the stuff slapped onto unsalted crackers, all the while straining, straining your jaw to note all your helpfully pithy butter sample-specific nonsense. Then we’ll talk!!!
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Overall Winner
Vital Farms Unsalted Butter
A resounding round of applause for this guy right here. It smelled sweet, but not too sweet. It tasted grassy and milky, but not too grassy and milky. It ate smoothly, it wasn’t greasy, it evoked images of rolling hills and gentle background cows. It made a bad thing (see: old salt-free saltines) better. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this butter has the highest butterfat content of the group at a whopping 84 percent (the others ranged anywhere from 78.6 to 83).
Runners-Up
Plugrà Unsalted Butter
Our associate editorial director, Megan, described this offering as a “robust buttery butter,” which I adore as both a butter taste test descriptor and a tongue twister. Despite the room temperature-ness of it all, Plugrà held just firm enough. Each tester noted and approved of its solidity and distinct dairy flavor. Our editorial director, Daniel, wrote: “Good!” which, as always, felt important enough on its own to include. IYKYK, etc., etc.
Finlandia Imported Unsalted Butter
There comes a time in every Serious Eats when our senior editor, Genevieve, identifies a sample as “like what I think ‘the thing we’re testing’ tastes like.” This one is what Genevieve thinks butter tastes like! It’s “lightly, lightly sweet” and the aroma was striking in, like, a pastoral way. This was another sturdy butter; Daniel noted its dense texture while tasting, and it held its own for long after the taste test concluded (See: It was seamless to handle and re-wrap). Finlandia specifies its unsalted butter runs between 82 to 83% butterfat, for what it’s worth.
The Contenders
- 365 by Whole Foods Market Unsalted Butter
- Beurre D’Isigny French AOP Unsalted Butter
- Breakstone’s Unsalted Butter
- Finlandia Imported Butter, Unsalted
- Horizon Organic Unsalted Butter
- Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter, Unsalted
- Land O’Lakes Unsalted Butter
- Organic Valley Unsalted Cultured Butter
- Vermont Creamery Cultured Unsalted Butter
- Vital Farms Unsalted Butter
Key Takeaways and Conclusion
If there’s one thing to take away from this tasting, it’s that there wasn’t a huge difference among any of these butters. Below, you’ll see a scored ranking and comments from tasters, and yes, technically, that’s how these butters scored. But we were all struck by the fact that it was pretty damn hard to tell any of these butters apart, aside from the faint tang of some of the cultured options. It’s worth noting that almost all of the scores hovered close to a very narrow one-point range.
Were there differences? Sure. Were they dramatic, life-altering, or at least butter-purchasing altering? No, not really. There were differences and some of us did feel that one or two brands truly rose above the rest, but they also all more or less tasted like…butter.
Take that as good news: Approach the butter section of the market free of the kind of decision-making anxiety that can freeze you in the cereal section for 43 minutes. You really can’t go wrong.
Our Tasting Methodology
All taste tests are conducted completely hidden and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria that vary from sample to sample. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.
