

For long-term storage, put your butter in the freezer, and it’ll last for 6 to 9 months. If you keep it at room temperature for too long, the oils in the butter will go rancid. For me, it was an odd, stale, bitter taste with a slightly funky smell. Butter can keep for at least a few days at room temp, but I’ve gone close to two weeks before something tasted a little off. How long does it take for butter to go rancid?Īir is the enemy of butter, because it oxidizes the fat and makes it spoil. … The bad taste and smell will ruin any recipe you will use it in. Can I bake with expired butter?Ĭan I use expired butter in a recipe? If the butter is past its expiry date, it is still useful as long as it doesn’t smell rancid. You want as little air in contact with the butter as possible. … The rate of butter going rancid can be much reduced by always covering butter left out to soften. We found that official USDA guidelines assumed butter should be refrigerated and only softened “ten to fifteen minutes” before use. Butter with mold should be discarded.Ĭan you refrigerate butter after it has been softened? Black spots on butter are signs of mold formation.Slice a small portion of your butter, if the inside looks brighter or lighter, then it has gone bad. Good butter has an even yellow color from inside out. Discoloration is a sign of rancid butter.How can you tell if unsalted butter is bad? That’s because the salt in salted butter adds extra protection against any sort of bacterial growth. It’s fine to leave unsalted butter out on the counter for a few hours if you’re planning to bake with it, but if you’re going to leave any butter out at room temperature for an extended period of time, make it salted. Can you leave unsalted butter unrefrigerated? Drizzle with maple syrup (the syrup is just one of the flavors drizzle lightly and evenly over the whole surface of the bread, but do not drown the toast as you would pancakes). The USDA does not recommend leaving it out more than one to two days. Spread immediately with soft Kerrygold Unsalted Butter there should be enough to leave a little butter pooled on the surface. But if it’s left out for several days at room temperature, it can turn rancid causing off flavors. How long can unsalted butter sit out on the counter?Īccording to the USDA, butter is safe at room temperature. However, it will stay fresh longer if it is kept in the refrigerator. … Studies have shown that butter has a shelf life of many months, even when stored at room temperature ( 6, 10 ). Unsalted, whipped or raw, unpasteurized butter is best kept in the fridge to minimize the chances of bacterial growth ( 4 ). And the easiest way to not get caught off guard is to just make sure you grab some next time you’re at the market.Advertisements. So, the moral of the story – always have unsalted butter on hand when you cook, and unless the recipe calls specifically for salted butter, or you’re slathering it into bread, a muffin, a stack of my French toast or fresh corn in the cob, stay away from it and use unsalted as your go to butter of choice when you cook. The next time I made the recipe I was sure to have unsalted butter on hand, and what a difference! Yes, I added additional salt at the end to get it to taste, but that’s when you can control the salt level, which is exactly when you should be. However the salt here has a specific job to do – to sweat out the moisture and it just doesn’t work as well when the bulk of the salt is dissolved in the butter. Now, the simplest solution would be to reduce the amount of salt called for later in the recipe which is after adding the onion and celery to the melted butter to cook down. No wonder it was saltier than I’d have hoped. Since I use kosher salt that can be an equivalent of my adding over another 1/2 tsp into the recipe. It turns out that a single 1/4 lb stick of salted butter can contain as much as 3/4 tsp of salt. I reflected on the recipe and did everything right except for the unsalted butter.

I didn’t have unsalted butter and went with what I had. The recipe calls for 1/2 a stick when cooking off the onions and carrots. Then one day, I made chicken and dumplings from Cook’s Country for the first time. I started to notice that if I paid attention to recipes they were specifying the unsalted variety, but I would just ignore that and use what was on hand. This though is more often than not a mistake and you should be using more unsalted butter when cooking.įor years, I too was guilty of this simple goof. Butter is a staple ingredient in my pantry and is found in many a recipe but most home cooks are likely to just use regular, sweet, salted butter almost exclusively.
