Montana, I Tried this Butter “Hack” and it’s Pretty Slick

Cold butter and soft bread... it's an age-old problem, right? Hard butter is practically impossible to spread on a piece of fresh bread, and not much easier on a piece of toast.

When I had a house full of kids - who devoured food faster than I could get to the grocery store - we usually kept a little butter tub container on the counter. We'd go thru a stick of butter so quickly, that I wasn't concerned about it getting rancid or spoiling.

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Now that we're down to just two kids, we use a lot less butter and I've noticed that it starts tasting a little off after sitting at room temp for more than a day or two. So now we leave it in the fridge until needed. Fine and dandy, until it's time to put that delicious dairy spread on bread.

I never have good luck when I try to thaw out a stick of butter in the microwave. No matter how carefully I set the power level and time, the butter always seems to go from a cold hard stick to a melted puddle in a matter of seconds.

"Is that a potato peeler?"

My kid asked incredulously a few weeks ago when she saw me reaching for the utensil to try out this "butter hack" that I came across on social media. The poster explained how shaving a stick of cold butter with a vegetable peeler can change your life.

Okay, maybe not life-changing, but this trick does work extremely well. Using a full stick of refrigerated butter, I pared off perfect curls of butter with the potato peeler. Using more or less force will produce slightly thicker or thinner slices of butter that you can place on your bread/toast/bagel like little pieces of cheese.