I can’t believe all this butter

I decided to buy an 8-pound tub of butter from South Mountain Creamery. I usually buy butter from Costco in 4-lb packages (each stick is a quarter pound, 4 sticks of butter in a box, 4 boxes in a Costco pack), so I don’t mind having butter around in bulk; it freezes very well. And with constant baking (two sticks of butter in a batch of cookies, or one stick in a loaf of banana bread), as well as constant cooking (virtually every time I heat a pan to saute something, I usually start with a pat of butter and a glug of olive oil), butter disappears from my household at a fairly regular rate.

So, back to the 8-pound tub. Compared to Costco prices, it’s not actually a very good deal; Costco will sell you 4 lbs of butter for $11.50, so that’s $23 for 8 lbs, whereas South Mountain Creamery charges $27.69, plus extra if you’re having it delivered. But it’s from a small operation, from sustainably-raised cows on a local farm, so some markup is not unexpected.

An awesome friend of mine has a recurring delivery from South Mountain, and kindly agreed to add my tub of butter to her weekly delivery, so I did at least save on the delivery fee. It was pretty intimidating to be faced with this giant tub of butter. But I wasn’t about to freeze the whole thing in a solid block, so I got out a couple of tablespoons, my kitchen scale, and some plastic wrap, and got down to business.

portioning out the butter

I figured the best way to portion the butter was in the form I was already familiar with: the standard “stick” of butter, 4 oz each (or 1/4 lb). I set the kitchen scale to ounces, put a piece of plastic wrap on top, and started spooning out chunks of butter. Whenever I had added and subtracted enough butter to equal 4 oz, I wrapped the 4 oz of butter up in plastic wrap and started squishing it into a vaguely rectangular shape, using my phone and the counter surface.

The process started to speed up as I got a better feel for how much butter would be in each 4 oz batch. I ended up getting 30 sticks of butter, plus a bit extra (less than 2 oz) that I stuck in the fridge for later. Here are the sticks in the freezer, all wrapped up and bagged.

split up and bagged in the freezer

I know, right? Only 30 sticks? I had been expecting 32. (Because 30 sticks of 4 oz each actually comes to only 30 x 4 = 120 oz, and 120 / 16 = 7.5 pounds of butter, which is a half pound less than the 8 lb advertised.) I weighed the butter again after I had made it into sticks, just to make sure that I hadn’t messed up during the portioning process, but all of it still came to about 7.5 lbs. I’m kind of disappointed that I didn’t get my full 8 pounds of butter, but on the other hand, this is more butter than I’ve ever had in my freezer at once, so it feels silly to complain.

2 thoughts on “I can’t believe all this butter

  1. Omg, that is so much butter, lol! What a bakers dream… I may have to do this, because too often do I find myself going to the fridge and realizing I’m out of butter.

    • It really is an enormous amount of butter, and it took me almost an hour to get everything all portioned out and wrapped up. But we’ve already gone through three sticks of it! And it’s really awesome and creamy.

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