Butter is the flavorful backbone of countless baked goods, providing a solid structure and pillowy texture to some of the most loved treats. Read the guide below to learn about 18 different types of butter, which butter types are well-suited to baking cookies and breads, how to store butter and more.
WHAT TYPE OF BUTTER IS GOOD FOR BAKING?
The best butter for your baked goods depends on what type of recipe you’re whipping up. Unsalted, American-style butter works well in goods like cookies, pound cakes and pancakes that require the high-fat content of conventional butter and more flexibility with salt and flavor content.
European-style butter with a higher fat content works well when baking flaky, laminated doughs like puff pastries and pie crusts. If you’re feeling extra creative, try making butter from scratch to add to your favorite baked goods.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF BUTTER
The right type of butter can provide flavor, texture and structure to bread, crusts, puff pastries and baked goods. See a list of 18 different types of butter below to learn how they’re made and when to use them.
1. SALTED BUTTER
American-style salted butter contains at least 80 percent milk fat and incorporates about ¼ teaspoon of salt for every 4 ounces of butter. Salted butter works best in dishes that aren’t particularly sensitive to salt content and need a pop of flavor. Use salted butter to sautée vegetables or top off savory dishes like sausage and summer veggie hash with fried eggs.
2. UNSALTED BUTTER
American-style unsalted butter typically contains 80 percent milk fat just like salted butter, but doesn’t include a salt additive, making it slightly sweeter. Unsalted butter is best suited to baked goods like blueberry pecan pancakes or no-knead Italian semolina bread that require a delicate balance of salty and sweet.
3. SWEET CREAM BUTTER
Sweet cream butter employs fresh cream—rather than cultured or soured cream—as its base ingredient. Most American-style butter is considered sweet cream and has slightly less tang than European-style butters that are typically cultured or fermented. You’ll find both salted and unsalted sweet cream butter in the grocery aisle and use it as you would use traditional butter in cooking and baking.
4. CULTURED BUTTER
Cultured butter implements bacterial cultures into its cream base, then ferments for at least 24 hours to create a rich and slightly piquant flavor. You can leverage cultured butter’s strengths in classically buttery baked goods and dishes like golden vanilla birthday cakeor mashed potatoes.
5. CLARIFIED BUTTER
Water and milk solids combine to make butterfat, but clarified butter takes out water and milk solids to create a base for indulgent sauces or drizzles. You can quickly clarify butter at home by melting butter over low heat, then removing it from the heat once solids separate from the fat. Simply skim the foam off the top, then pour clarified butter out of the pan and away from milk solids resting on the bottom of the pan.
6. ORGANIC BUTTER
Like most organic products, organic butter is derived from cows raised without exposure to hormones, antibiotics, pesticides or food grown with synthetic fertilizers. You can use salted or unsalted organic butter the same way you’d use traditional butter, meaning it can lay the foundation for baked goods like butter cake with whipped cream & seasonal berriesor add flavor to dishes like zucchini noodles with tomato butter sauce.
7. PLANT-BASED BUTTER
Like margarine, plant-based butters combine water with vegetable oils, rather than butterfat, to produce a vegan alternative to butter made from milk fat. Most plant-based butters use some combination of olive, soybean, palm kernel, sunflower and coconut oil.In its stick form, this type of butter typically contains a high enough fat content to act as a vegan substitute for cooking or baking.
8. GRASS-FED BUTTER
You can use regular butter and grass-fed butter interchangeably in baked or cooked recipes or as a spread. Grass-fed butter is made using milk from cows that graze in grasslands in the summer and eat hay in the winter rather than feast on grain year-round. The cows’ vitamin-rich diet may lead to more nutritious butter that typically has a richer hue.
9. EUROPEAN BUTTER
European-style butter contains more milk fat and less water than American-style butter—sitting somewhere between 82-86 percent—and can provide a rich base for butter-heavy puff pastries like croissants or profiteroles with salted caramel ice cream and poached spiced pears.Learn more about how to make profiteroles.
10. SPREADABLE BUTTER
Often confused with margarine, spreadable butter typically contains less than 60 percent oil, up to 40 percent water and is made of some butter mixed with vegetable oils. Unlike pure butter, spreadable butter doesn’t harden in cool temperatures, making it easy to glide over your morning French toast sliders.
While you can bake with spreadable butter in a pinch, it’s not recommended. The high water content of spreadable butter can lead to dry, tough, soggy or stale baked goods.
11. WHIPPED BUTTER
Whipped butter is infused with nitrogen gas to create a fluffy and silky texture perfect for spreading on banana bread, pumpkin muffins or lemon buttermilk pancakes. Nitrogen gas, rather than air, is whipped into butter to help prevent it from oxidizing and spoiling quickly. Its unique, airy structure means you should stick to spreading and avoid baking with whipped butter.
If you’re craving whipped butter to spread on your freshly baked bread, you can also create some at home as long as you plan to use it within a few days. Simply whip softened butter and a bit of milk with your hand mixer or stand mixer. You can also customize your homemade whipped butter with flavorful additions like honey, herbs or spices.
12. GOAT BUTTER
This mildly tangy butter variation is made by churning goat’s milk rather than cow’s milk, and is typically considered lactose-intolerant friendly. Goat butter is similar to traditional butter in terms of fat content but resembles shortening and has a slightly grassier flavor than its cow-derived counterpart. Goat butter has a low melting point, so it may be best suited for short breads and cookies that are more tender in nature.
13. SMEN BUTTER
Smen is a cheese-like, fermented butter that you’re most likely to come across in Middle Eastern or North African cuisine. It’s produced by first melting and skimming butter, then adding lots of salt prior to kneading. The butter is then stored in an airtight container and allowed to ferment (sometimes for years) before use.
Smen butter has a strong cheese flavor and is typically used as a spread on grains like a sourdough bread loaf or olive oil crackers, or in cooking couscous.
14. AMISH BUTTER
Most often produced by Amish communities and farms, Amish butter is slow-churned until it reaches about 84 percent butterfat and typically rolled into one or two-pound logs. Like European-style butter, Amish butter has a rich and creamy flavor profile that can elevate the texture and richness of baked goods like pie crusts and lavender shortbread cookies.
15. COMPOUND BUTTER
Compound butter combines the rich, creamy flavor of butter with various herbs and spices perfect for adding a punch of flavor to savory dishes. Spices and herbs like paprika, chipotle chile powder, thyme and basil are common compound butter additives.
You’ll often find compound butters rolled into a log form that makes it easy to slice coins for placing on top of entrees like grilled Tennessee steak or sides like whole wheat seed bread.
16. BROWNED BUTTER
Browned butter refers to a technique for preparing butter, rather than the butter’s ingredients, and starts with unsalted butter. You can gradually heat unsalted butter on the stovetop until it melts, and then the solid milk fats will start to brown, creating a fragrant and rich aroma that adds a nutty, caramel-like flavor to baked goods like browned butter sweet potato bread with walnutsor brown butter white chocolate cranberry cookies.
Its uses in baked goods may seem more obvious, but you can also use this versatile ingredient as a dipping sauce base for seafood like shrimp and crab legs or as an extra drizzle for pan roasted ratatouille vegetables or pumpkin ravioli with browned butter sauce.
17. LIGHT BUTTER
Light butter is made to mimic the flavor and appearance of traditional butter while reducing the amount of fat, calories and cholesterol per serving. The milk fat content in light butter is typically around 40 percent, as opposed to the 80 percent found in traditional butter, and light butter generally relies on vegetable oils and water to close the gap.
The shift in the composition of light butter may lead to unpredictable results in baked foods, so light butter is best suited to use as a spread or drizzle.
18. MARGARINE BUTTER
Margarine is typically made from vegetable oils like palm and soybean oil, then mixed with water, salt and other ingredients to create its butter-like flavoring and spreadable consistency. It’s formulated to look and taste like butter, but margarine doesn’t usually contain any dairy ingredients. Margarine’s consistency makes it easier to spread on snacks likestrawberry oatmeal breakfast muffins or braided challah bread.
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WHAT TYPE OF FAT IS BUTTER?
Butter begins as a combination of water, fat and milk solids, then transforms into a separated mixture of buttermilk and butterfat (also known as milk fat) as it’s churned. American butter varieties contain at least 80 percent butterfat while most European-style butter has somewhere between 82 to 86 percent butterfat.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BAKING WITH UNSALTED VS. SALTED BUTTER?
Salted and unsalted butter both contain the same quality base, but salted butter has added salt that’s ideal for topping steamed root vegetables, adding flavor to homemade pasta dishes or spreading on homemade bread.
Unsalted butter is better suited to baked goods like cookies that are sensitive to salt content and rely on butter’s creamy flavor profile,helping ensure that you don’t end up with an overly-salty baked good.
WHAT TYPE OF BUTTER IS BEST FOR COOKIES?
Batches of baked goods like sea salt miso chocolate chunk cookies or salted caramel ginger cookies typically do best with American-style, unsalted butter. Unsalted butter gives you more control over the balance of flavors in your recipe while American-style butter offers just enough fat content to create a crisp exterior and fluffy interior.
You can use butter with a higher fat content—like European-style butter—in cookies, but they may turn out flatter and more dense than recipes with butter that has higher water content.
WHAT IS THE BEST TYPE OF BUTTER FOR MAKING BREAD?
Breads like homemade brioche and parker house rollsrely on butter to create a pillowy soft texture and rich flavor. Enriched bread recipes may do best with European-style butter that has a high-fat concentration and can tolerate the kneading process without breaking into bits.
However, recipes like cinnamon coffee scones may do better with American-style butters that have higher water content to help create air pockets. Whichever you choose, keep in mind that adding butter last can help gluten develop properly to give your final product the structure it needs.
HOW DO YOU STORE BUTTER?
You can store butter at room temperature, in the freezer or in the refrigerator, but each storage method has its own unique shelf life. Butter stored on the countertop can sit out for a couple of days in an airtight container, while butter in the refrigerator can last until its expiration date. Frozen butter should be in an airtight container and can stay fresh for up to four months, then used within 30 days of thawing.
EXPLORE KITCHENAID® STAND MIXERS, ATTACHMENTS AND ACCESSORIES
KitchenAid® stand mixers are compatible with the KitchenAid® attachments1 and accessoriesyou need to create anything from a delicate, flaky pie crust to the spiralized apples you may put inside. Use a KitchenAid® wire whip accessory to effortlessly cream butter in a KitchenAid® stand mixer bowl that represents your culinary personality, then try attachments like the KitchenAid® Sifter + Scale Attachment to help ensure flour for your creation is accurately sifted and measured.
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