{"id":248,"date":"2014-05-27T10:36:50","date_gmt":"2014-05-27T14:36:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kitchen.wasteofbytes.com\/?p=248"},"modified":"2014-05-27T10:38:08","modified_gmt":"2014-05-27T14:38:08","slug":"i-cant-believe-all-this-butter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kitchen.wasteofbytes.com\/?p=248","title":{"rendered":"I can’t believe all this butter"},"content":{"rendered":"

I decided to buy an 8-pound tub of butter from South Mountain Creamery<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"portioning<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"split<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kitchen.wasteofbytes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kitchen.wasteofbytes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kitchen.wasteofbytes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kitchen.wasteofbytes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kitchen.wasteofbytes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/kitchen.wasteofbytes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kitchen.wasteofbytes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kitchen.wasteofbytes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kitchen.wasteofbytes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}