I tried 25 types of butter – here are the best value-for-money
“We know the secret of life. The secret is butter.” So says Gérard Depardieu’s character in the film Last Holiday. Plenty of cooks might agree, and they’d only be half joking.
Olive oil has many charms, but you can’t make a beurre blanc with it, or let it melt enticingly on a hot crumpet, and nothing beats the flavour of real butter in a cake. A tomato sauce which starts with an onion cooked in butter – not oil – has a mellow, creamy sweetness, while steak fried in butter and oil will caramelise better than oil alone.
Butter is the great survivor, first created around 10,000 years ago and having faced down the rise of margarine, the recent angst over saturated fat and last year’s massive price hikes. Wholesale butter prices are nearly a quarter less than they were a year ago, which has (up to a point) been reflected at the supermarket.
The Office for National Statistics shows average prices a year ago at ￡2.29 for a 250g block, peaking in February this year at an average of ￡2.36, before falling back to ￡2.15 in September.
At the peak of price rises, Lurpak and Anchor dropped their pack size to 200g, presumably to make them look cheaper. Thankfully, supermarket own-label packs are still 250g, and currently cost ￡1.69 in most supermarkets for the cheapest, compared to ￡2.15 a year ago.
Butter used to be just salted or unsalted, but among butter-philes whether or not the cream has been “cultured” – had microbes added to enrich the flavour – matters too. It’s a trend that was led by the likes of Pepe Saya butter in Australia and Butter Vikings on this side of the globe.
But until the end of the 19th century, all our butter would have had a cultured flavour, as the milk would be left to stand so that the cream floated to the top, ready to be skimmed off, and inevitably started fermenting. It was only in 1878, with the invention of the centrifugal cream separator, combined with advances in refrigeration, that it became possible to make the “sweet cream” unfermented butter that we regard as standard today.
Cultured butter, with its gently cheesy tang, is nowadays almost always made with pasteurised milk which has had a lactic culture added back in. It is still popular on the continent but here is more of a niche product, the kind of thing that spurs waiters in posh restaurants to launch into a five-minute spiel on the subject.
Butter is trendy now. Chef Thomas Straker is credited with starting last year’s social media craze for flavoured butter, with short videos of combinations like bone marrow butter and bloody mary butter, slickly scooped into elegant quenelles and then gobbled up on toast or steak or fried chicken. His beurre noisette butter recipe, essentially butter sizzled until brown then re-chilled and sprinkled with lemon zest and sea salt, scored 19 million views on TikTok alone.
Straker, brought up on a smallholding in Herefordshire, knows his butter. He has just introduced a range sold in Ocado as well as Planet Organic and Milk & More, with one per cent of turnover going to farming charities.
The salted and unsalted weren’t ready in time for my tasting but I found the garlic and herb and the chilli flavours useful for topping fish or meat, or stirring through rice and pasta. He reckons that unsalted is the go-to for cooking, while salted is the best for spreading.
For this tasting I stuck to salted butter, either cultured or uncultured (it’s not always immediately obvious from the pack) as it’s by far the best selling kind in the UK. I’ve a lingering nostalgia for unsalted, which tastes to me of holidays in France.
Chefs generally prefer it as it gives them more control over how much salt to add, and bakers like it as it tends to have a slightly higher fat content. But the truth is most of us keep salted in the fridge and buying separate butter for cooking isn’t realistic.
Tasting my way through 25 butters, it was noticeable that those with more artisanal credentials had fissures like woodgrain, showing where the butter had been folded, with sometimes a faint weeping around the grains of salt. Sometimes – but not always – this translated into more flavour.
How much flavour do we want in our butter? By and large, the greatest crime amongst the butters I tried was that they were dull.
A couple had some off flavours, which I suspect is to do with a badly stored batch: butter absorbs flavours very easily, which is a bonus if you are making Straker-style, fancy butter but less so if the storage conditions are less than perfectly fragrant.
Some might be relegated to cooking rather than spreading, simply for being more ordinary than others, even if for a few recipes – notably croissants – a richly flavoured butter can pay dividends. And with a good marmalade, a mild butter might be just the ticket. The “secret of life” might be stretching it, but butter is certainly the secret of a great breakfast.
The taste test
Could do butter
M&S Collection Cornish Gold Butter with Sea Salt
￡3.80 for 250g, Ocado
Looks the part – deep yellow with handmade looking cracks – but only 40% of the salt is actual sea salt, and there’s very little flavour. Not worth the price.
Aldi Selected West Country Butter
￡1.99 for 250g, Aldi
Pockmarked and with seeping water around the salt crystals, it looks homemade. The flavour is very clean up front, but there’s a slightly fridge-y after taste.
Kerrygold Salted Butter
￡2.60 for 250g, Asda
Smooth and slightly waxy, this is not clean tasting, with a musty flavour. Kerrygold is widely admired for using milk from grass-fed cows, and has legions of fans, so maybe this was a dud batch.
Country Life British Salted Butter
￡2.45 for 250g, Ocado
A mid-yellow butter with a smooth homogenous texture that’s slightly waxy. It’s got an unremarkable flavour that’s a bit on the salty side. Very clean but quite bland.
Yeo Valley Organic Salted Butter
￡2.85 for 200g, Sainsbury’s
Smooth and very waxy with a savoury flavour. Unfortunately, the texture is not quite there. However, Yeo’s organic credentials are good.
Tesco British Salted Block Butter
￡1.69 for 250g
One of those products where you’re not sure what you think of it. It’s pale in colour, clean-tasting and has a nice melt. However it tastes a little bit bland and it’s got a waxy texture which I just can’t get excited about.
M&S Salted Softer Butter
￡2.80 for 250g, Ocado
There’s pockets of air in this one, and it’s very salty with not a lot else going on.
Isigny Sainte-Mere Unpasteurised Salted Butter
￡3.50 for 250g, Ocado
The taste is very subtle at first but then comes a strong fermented after tang which is very cheesy. It is smooth but a bit greasy.
Waitrose Essential Salted Dairy Butter
￡1.90 for 250g
Not quite smooth with a couple of tiny fissures. There’s also a hint of fruitiness – fine, but not thrilling.
Asda Extra Special West Country Butter
￡2.35 for 250g
Looks rustic and there’s beads of moisture around the salt. It tastes clean and mild but overall it is pretty unremarkable.
Waitrose French Butter with Sea Salt Crystals
￡2.50 for 250g
You may describe this as subtle or bland depending on your point of view. However, it is enlivened with grains of salt which give a nice crunchy texture.
Morrisons Savers Salted Butter
￡1.69 for 250g
Smooth and even with some buttery depth, although it is slightly waxy.
M&S Salted British Butter
￡2 for 250g, Ocado
Standard stuff. It’s not completely homogeneous, but it’s got a good milky flavour and wavy texture.
Aldi Cowbelle British Salted Butter
￡1.69 for 250g
A good choice if you like your butter not too salty. It’s got a very clean, mild and savoury taste with a smooth texture.
Lurpak Slightly Salted Butter
￡2.15 for 200g
This has a nice, gently savoury quality that certainly won’t fight with your marmalade.
Ocado British Salted Butter
￡1.69 for 250g
A good all rounder that has a smooth texture and pleasant savouriness to it.
Sainsbury’s Salted British Butter
￡1.69 for 250g
Smooth as a slab of lard and pale in colour, but it has a nice big savoury flavour.
Anchor Salted Butter
￡2 for 250g, Ocado
This is a good standard butter that s very smooth and even. Loaded with umami.
Morrisons The Best West Country Butter
￡2.49 for 250g
This looks handmade – you can see the roll, the layers of fat and some salt crystals. You really do need to like salt though, and it has twice as much as some brands. Pleasantly buttery.
Asda Salted Butter
￡1.89 for 250g
There’s a pleasing true butteriness quality to this one – it appears very smooth, doesn’t have that waxiness and melts nicely. The flavour profile is quite big and it’s both milky and creamy.
President French Slightly Salted Butter
￡2.70 for 250g, Ocado
This tastes like the butter you have on holiday. It’s got a very distinctive and lactic fermented flavour with a cheesy and yoghurty tang.
Asda Organic Slightly Salted Butter
￡2.75 for 250g
This has a very standardised look and it is quite pale in colour. The flavour itself is very savoury with a salty grassy taste, despite it being one of the lowest in salt. Soft and not at all greasy with a soft, melt in the mouth feel.
Trewithen Dairy Cornish Salted Butter
￡2.65 for 250g, Ocado
There is almost a clotted cream quality about this one and it doesn’t have much of a big flavour – mild and sweet – but I think that’s a good thing. There is a lot of salt so again, you’d have to really like it to get on with this one.
Butter up
Duchy Organic English Salted Butter
￡3.25 for 250g, Waitrose
With a woodgrain-like appearance, this is complex, but not overly strong. I can imagine it thickly spread on a piece of Irish soda bread. Worth splashing out for.
Lidl Deluxe West Country Butter with Sea Salt Crystals
￡1.99 for 250g, Lidl
Striated like a piece of limestone and sparkling with crunchy salt. It has a really milky, subtle flavour. It melts beautifully too.
Asda Salted Butter
￡1.89 for 250g, Asda
A tad more expensive than some of the other supermarket butters, but with a pleasing buttery, grassy flavour, and a nice, not too waxy melt. Good value, and the Asda Organic Butter scored well too.