Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter; food styling by Maggie Ruggiero
Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter; food styling by Maggie Ruggiero
Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter; food styling by Maggie Ruggiero
Top pick
Golden, grassy, and velvety: Kerrygold is the closest thing to the platonic ideal of butter in most supermarkets.
The first time you use Kerrygold in one of your favorite baking recipes, you can’t help but notice its pronounced buttery flavor and aroma—you’ll be hooked.
The experience of unwrapping a brick of Kerrygold Salted Butter is almost transcendent. Peeling back the golden foil, catching a glimpse of the similarly golden butter beneath, and you’re reaching for a knife and a slice of bread before you even know what you’re doing.
We missed out on all of this ceremony in our tasting, instead receiving a small pat of butter in a small container. And yet, every taster looked down at their little pat of butter and gushed about its sunny yellow tones.
Kerrygold was one of the few butters in our tests that spread well when cold, without crumbling or lumping too stubbornly on the bread. At room temperature it slid on the bread with one satisfyingly smooth motion, and rather than melting, it sat in a glossy, thick, even layer. The texture was luxuriously creamy, dense, and silky, without any mouth-coating greasiness.
It’s addictively salty, especially at room temperature, but it’s a well-balanced saltiness. The flavor of the pasture really comes forward in this butter, with fresh, grassy notes, alongside a slightly cheesy, animal flavor. It’s a true reflection of the verdant fields it hails from. To qualify as grass-fed in Ireland, cows must obtain 90% of their feed intake from grass (though most Irish herds exceed this minimum). Ireland’s climate is well suited to growing grass, and animals can stay on pasture for a significant portion of the year, which means Kerrygold butter is delicious year-round.
In our buttered noodles test, Kerrygold made a thick, glossy emulsification that evenly coated the noodles. It was extremely buttery and savory, with a fresh grassy flavor and a balanced salt level. The flavor was second only to the buttered noodles made with Isigny Ste Mère butter, by a slim margin. Whether you choose to make a sauce with it or just melt it straight on top of a dish, the flavor it adds does not go unnoticed.
If you’ve never baked with Kerrygold Unsalted Butter, do yourself a favor and use it in your next pie, pound cake, or batch of shortbread. Its full dairy flavor and hint of grassiness will bring more to your baked goods than most of the pallid sticks that make up most of the butter case at the supermarket. It’s rich but not unctuous, and its velvety mouthfeel dissipates into a clean finish without leaving behind a greasy coat.
Our tasters liked the shortbread we made with Kerrygold for its “sandy, soft, and melt-in-your-mouth” texture. This shortbread also had one of the strongest buttery presences of all the batches we made. When baked, Kerrygold’s slight cheesiness becomes more pronounced, adding complexity to sweet recipes—but it’s not overwhelming, just a balancing of flavors.
Kerrygold makes an incredibly flaky and crisp pie crust. It wasn’t the most tender crust, but we wouldn’t go so far as to call it tough. It was just a little sturdier than others.
Kerrygold is the butter of choice for many on the Wirecutter kitchen team because it’s excellent to bake with, widely available, and an excellent deal if you buy it in bulk from Costco.
Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter; food styling by Maggie Ruggiero
Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter; food styling by Maggie Ruggiero
Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter; food styling by Maggie Ruggiero
Top pick
Tangy, fresh, cheesy, and interspersed with coarse salt, this is a butter to serve for a special occasion.
This butter is churned from cultured cream, giving it a slightly acidic finish that adds another dimension to your baked goods.
If the elegant packaging and rustic oval shape didn’t give it away, this is fancy butter. With a craggy surface and a scattering of salt crystals studded into pockets of butter, Isigny Ste Mère Salted Butter had the most irregular appearance of all the butters we tested; don’t be alarmed, but the salt crystals can cause a little weeping when the butter’s temperature changes. We felt this irregularity added to its artisanal appeal.
Beurre d’Isigny has a protected designation of origin, ensuring that all parts of production take place in Isigny-sur-Mer and meet specific criteria for quality. The cows graze on wetlands in a restricted area around Isigny-sur-Mer, giving the butter made from their milk a unique flavor.
It’s deeply buttery, cheesy, and tangy, with all the complexity of a cultured butter and the freshness that high-quality milk brings. There’s still some sweetness of the cream, with a hint of caramel. It’s also quite salty, though not off-puttingly so—the salt crystals add a crunch and an additional burst of saltiness in alternating bites.
And though you may be tempted to ration your chunk of Isigny Ste Mère butter and use it only for spreading, it’s truly transformative in other preparations, too. In our buttered noodle test, it melted into a thick, rich emulsion that clung to our noodles, almost a sauce in and of itself. The grassy, savory, and just slightly funky notes all came through, along with a good punch of salt, turning a bowl of spaghetti into a luscious, moreish meal.
If you want a little more complexity from the butter you bake with, cultured Isigny Ste Mère Unsalted Butter imbues your baked goods with a sweet, dairy-rich flavor and a slight tang at the end. That extra little zing is a pleasant foil to the sweetness and richness of many baked goods. Like its salted counterpart, Isigny unsalted butter tastes slightly cheesy, with a rich yellow hue that’s a result of cows raised on pasture.
Its flavor really shines in simple recipes like shortbread. In our tests, many panelists agreed that the Isigny Ste Mère shortbread had a somewhat dense yet tender crumb, with a flaky surface and pleasantly crisp outer edge. Our tasters also liked this shortbread for its intense buttery flavor and aroma.
The pie crust we made with Isigny Ste Mère Unsalted Butter was mostly on par with our other unsalted butter picks. They were all flaky and tender, and all crusts we’d be very proud of in a finished pie. The Isigny crust slightly stood out from the rest because of its hint of savory flavor and slightly crumbly texture in the center.
Even though Isigny Ste Mère is one of the spendier of our picks, we wouldn’t hesitate to use this butter for special-occasion sweet recipes, like an elegant dessert at the end of a dinner party. But if the term “savory” makes you shy away from using this butter in your next cake or galette, try it for your next chicken pot pie.
Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter; food styling by Maggie Ruggiero
Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter; food styling by Maggie Ruggiero
Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter; food styling by Maggie Ruggiero
Top pick
Finlandia salted butter is light on the salt, but it’s fresh, simple, and fatty. It’s a rich butter that won’t overpower the flavor of anything you pair it with.
This unsalted butter delivers fresh cream butter flavor and slight nuttiness, with an unctuous mouthfeel that dissipates into a clean finish.
Light yellow and decently spreadable even when cold, the Finlandia Imported Salted Butter Bar was well liked by all of our testers, although they disagreed over their preference for it cold or at room temperature.
It’s fresh, a little grassy, and balanced, with a toned-down saltiness that doesn’t interfere with the sweet flavor of the cream. At room temperature, it’s smooth and glossy, spreading effortlessly across bread.
It’s a rich butter, but relatively neutral and straightforward, making it a good base for other flavors to shine. On buttered noodles, it was thinner than we’d like, and notably light in flavor. If you’re looking to make an especially luxurious, buttery sauce, we recommend using Isigny Ste Mère or Kerrygold instead.
The Finlandia Imported Unsalted Butter Bar is a great choice for baking if you like hints of nuttiness in your pies and tarts. Even though this butter has a distinct grassiness when tasted on its own, the sweetness and nutty flavor really shone through when we baked pie crust and shortbread with it.
The shortbread we baked with Finlandia unsalted butter had a distinct hazelnut flavor and aroma, along with a clean brightness (maybe the grass?) that set it apart from the other batches. It also had a strong, very distinct sweetness that can only come from the natural sugars in cow’s milk, not cane sugar. We liked the texture of the shortbread we made as well—crumbly, sandy, and a little flaky.
If you want to achieve the quintessential pie crust—flaky, golden, and crisp, yet tender—try Finlandia butter the next time you bake. In our tests, the crust was one of the flakiest we made, with a crispiness that provided just enough tooth before it melted away on the tongue. And just as with the shortbread, Finlandia butter infused our pie crust with a warm browned-hazelnut flavor.