Salted vs unsalted butter 

Q: Is Elaine Khosrova's book "Butter: A Rich History" really good, and would it make a great gift item for the food-lover in my life? A: Absolutely! #NotAnAd www.workman.com/products/butter-2 I also believe the Kindle version is on sale. Elaine is good people. You should buy her book. Q: Aren't there some things in the world of baking that absolutely require unsalted butter? A: Sure. I have a recipe for sweet cornbread where I heavily butter the pan before pouring in the batter; if you use salted butter, the crust ends up way too salty, IMHO. It's also conceivable that salted butter could mess with the chemistry of certain highly-sensitive pastries, but I would imagine that'd be pretty rare. Even sweets need salt, and I'm having trouble thinking of any batters or breads or cakes in which you would add the fat and the salt at radically different points in the process, though I'm sure something like that must exist. Q: Isn't it dangerous to eat raw batters? A: Yes. There's a risk of e. coli, not just from the eggs, but also from the flour. For a healthy person such as myself, I think the risk is pretty minimal, but I am absolutely taking a chance when I taste raw batters for seasoning (or when I eat an entire batch of raw cookie dough because whoops). We take risks in life. Your own risks are your own choice. But, I'll point out that if you wanted to taste a cake batter or something for seasoning, you could almost instantaneously cook a drop of it in a hot pan or in the microwave. Just be aware that temperature also affects our salt perception, so cool it down to comfortable eating temperature before you taste. Q: Does this mean it's dangerous to leave butter on the counter all the time? My mom does that and we're not dead yet. A: Surely it depends on a lot of factors, but in general, butter is gonna start to taste gross long before it starts to be dangerous. Rancidity, in and of itself, is not dangerous. It's just yucky. Q: Why is your phone at 2%? A: My kids play games on my phone. By the end of the day, it's pretty dead. You'll note I was shooting that stuff at 12:30 at night.

When choosing between salted and unsalted butter, there's no margarine for error.

us people: salted butter is fine European people: never use salted butter for cooking my Asian parent: what do you mean margarine isn't just another word for butter?

I was born and lived for the first 18 years of my life in Bulgaria and I had never even heard of salted butter. The most common basic butter sold everywhere was unsalted. Maybe you could find salted ones in huge supermarkets or something but I suppose you'd need to look for it. I was surprised to learn salted butter was a thing when I first came to UK

This is really funny that you found out about unsalted butter after so many years, and I am from Poland and I didn't know that salted butter exist until recently. You can't get that stuff in a typical store in Poland.

i use whatever butter thats on sale

never knew saltiness of butter was controversial until now

Retired culinary arts instructor here: One of the most difficult trade skills to get the students to do is taste as you go. The phrase 'adjust seasoning' is so abstract to new cooks because many have the mindset, "Why taste something that isn't done or is raw?"

OK, small precision here: There's a region in France that pretty much only uses salted butter, including desserts : Bretagne. It gives that typical sweet and salted taste to everything they make and they're really proud of it. And people here use mostly unsalted butter because it's more common and therefore, cheaper. So much for being fancy

“Why I butter my salt, instead of salting my butter”

"you can't just taste raw cake or cookie batter" just try and stop me. a few stomach problems never did.

I am French and a professional chef in Australia, I love your videos. I just wanted to comment on the whole "following recipes in professional kitchen" because yes, we aim for standardisation, but also because of the quantities we make food in. If you're at home, you can debate on whether you should use half a pinch of salt of a whole pinch, but in a commercial kitchen, everything is done is way bigger quantities, some recipes I make call for 45g of salt or such, so you don't want to just pinch-and-guess

My grandmother used to make salted butter from cows milk that came from the mountains. It was salty, although I remember being utterly delicious with freshly baked sour bread she would make in the morning. I still remember that taste after 25 years!

I think being raised on Good Eats episodes after school is why I truly appreciate the science of cooking

I think this channel exhibits something my science teacher once said: "When you get to a certain point in cooking, you're actually just a chemist that doesn't realize he's a chemist."

I just go for unsalted to cut down in salt no matter what. After all you can always add salt but it is a lot harder to remove it once it is there.

Recently discovered your videos. Twenty videos later and I must say your channel is amazing. The guests are great and you provide all the needed info. Keep it up 👍

He forgot to mention that even cakes and frosting still have a small pinch of salt. I made old fashioned tapioca, it tasted BAD and flat, like I forgot the vanilla, I didn't. I forgot the pinch of salt! It was perfect then, that shocked me.

Americans: salted butter Europeans: nah unsalted That 1 aunt who is always dieting: i'll have 4 cups of margarine please

Adam: You can’t just taste the raw cake or cookie dough Everyone: *I accept your challenge*

I use salted butter as a bread spread while for cooking always I use "normal sweet" butter, as I learned it from my grandma.

Bro why don't you just get sponsored by macon Georgia?

The three stages of cooking knowledge: Stage 1 - "Satlted? Unsalted? Eh, either's fine." Stage 2 - "My butter *must* be unsalted!!" Stage 3 - "Salted? Unsalted? Eh, either's fine."

As a French I have to add here : in supermarkets you find unsalted, semi-salted (most common) and SALTED (fancy) whitch actually has grains of coarse salt in it and is perfect for maximum enjoyment spreader on a good slice of bread ! (And personally, I will also add, unsalted versus semi-salted IS a serious cause for arguing, bretons will fight you !)

A good salted butter for scrambled eggs is brilliant, I never have to add any because the fluffiness is proportional to the saltiness 😂

That was interesting. As a German, I have grown up with unsalted butter, that's the definition of butter to me. Butter being salted I thought to be an invention of the French, and thus, a bit high-classed 😁

As a european, the fact that you use "mi" when talking about milligrams instead of "mg" is deeply unsettling.

you're the only channel I would watch a video about butter for 13 minutes. I love your content.

just found your channel like yesterday, so far i think its the best stuff i've ever watched. I feel kinda motivated to do more advanced cooking after your 101 series. the first one I watched on your channel was the pancake one. that one kinda blew me away, my thought process was something as follows: ok, this guys gonna show another stupid life hacky way to cook boxed pancake mix by the title and thumbnail. wait, ok from scratch nice. I like this flow imma check out more of his videos later. hmm yeah i'm gonna have to get blueberry or maple they don't have raspberry here. wait what? wait now he's showing how to make the raspberry syrup from scratch? wait I spent hours looking for how to make a good caramel and he just threw it right in my face in a context I want it in? man I feel like some pancakes. and there's a part two? wait a minute the thumbnail wasn't photoshopped he actually made that AND showed how he did it. also your sponsorship segways are way better than ltt's somewhat older ones(I used to really like them). the one at 12:20 was definitely a great way to address your sponsor. you make it abundantly clear that the way you cook isn't "the" way and that everyone has different preferences and needs as well as giving a brief explanation on what to change if they don't want to make it the way you showed. this was very pronounced in your steak beginners video where you didn't go on about how you gotta make it leave the middle at this consistency or its not good and instead showed how to make the middle more or less cooked and how not to burn the outside. also, i am offput by raw meat but after watching a good chunk of your steak videos and checking your research i might just try it if i can afford meat soon lol if you haven't already I would absolutely LOVE to see you make a series of videos for kitchen equipment and spices from beginner up and for smaller areas and larger. idk if you'll read this but thanks for making my day lol. also, if you want something 3d modeled for a video hmu and i'll do it for free. heck, if its small i'd even print and mail it to you in pla.

Adam: If you're advanced enough cook to be using unsalted butter… me, who've seen salted butter like once in the entire lifetime: eh…

Anyone else bothered that he abbreviated milligrams as “mil” instead of “mg”?

It is so exciting to discover differences in our food cultures. I'm from Ukraine and I've never heard about salted butter, we are always eat sweet butter. But when you told about the way how your wife likes to eat bread with butter I realised that in my childhood one of our most cheap and delicious things was bread with butter covered with pinch of salt or sugar.

you can tell you grew up on Alton brown and I'm so here for it!! you literally have his editing cadence to the t. I always loved the way he edits everything to be so fast and quippy. oh hey you just mentioned him in the video! called it.

"The 'Président' butter that I had to get from the fancy grocery store..." Meanwhile, in Europe... "Aww man, they only have Président butter at my local shop. I'll hold off and get something better elsewhere."

Here in Germany butter is usually unsalted and I find it mildly interesting that the unsalted Kerrygold is in a gold packaging here, and the salted one in a silver one, which apparently is the other way around in the US. Well, I guess they put the default one in gold, because after all "gold" is in the name.

Wow. This was very fascinating!!! Thank you for the info!!!

Your channel is amazing. Thank you for doing this

Why I season my butter and NOT my cutting board

Funnily, as Italian I never heard of such a thing as "salty butter" .. only discovered it much later when I moved abroad

This was the first Ragusea video I ever watched. I was a limo chauffeur at the time, doing this big multi-day airport shuttle run out in Central Oregon for some reality TV thing. I had been up at all sorts of unholy hours, trying and failing to sleep in the motel, before going out and shuttling some more. Towards the end, I was exhausted and starving at 5 in the morning, and parked the limo at a diner to get literally anything. While I was dazedly eating my literally anything, this video came up. It was a great introduction to Peak Ragusea. Scholarly research, BJORN, expert interview, Alton Brown, professional vs. home kitchens, taste your food, heterogeneity!

You are now my favorite food youtuber. Always frustrated me when people get on their high horse about using unsalted butter, then turn around and add salt. DE MINIMIS! My new favorite phrase. (from your foam video, but it applies here) Also your ad reels are integrated flawlessly.

How to be Adam Ragusea 101: - Why I (blank) my (blank) and not my (blank) - Sponsored by Skillshare - Sponsored by Squarespace - WHITE WINE - Great cooking - Acidity - Great dad Much love Adam!!!!

I grew up in an unsaved butter household. Didn’t even know salted butter existed. As a kid, I went round to my friends one day and he made toast with salted butter. I thought he had a super amazing toaster and kept asking for toast every time I came to his house.

Man, im so gratefull for all information I get from you.

Adam, you rock..I grew up watching "Good eats" you are doing a great job..I'm now addicted to you're videos

_It's almost like a perfect binary system, in which the butter provides the substance and the salt provides the flavor._

My favorite thing about Adam's videos is when he gives the advice (in so many words), "this is what the experts do, and why it makes sense and is smart... but ultimately the ONLY thing that matters is if you like it or not. I appreciate the frankness and brutal honesty, straightforwardness, and reasonableness in all of his advice!

I enjoy these bits of food history which sets your channel apart from any other food channels

Salted butter saves time for some things. Like, when I make pancakes, and I want to put some butter on there, I use salted butter since I don't want to do the extra step of determining how much more salt I want to put on pancakes. The salted butter taste pretty good for me and it makes the process that much faster.

In the space of a week this has become my favourite cooking channel on RU-vid. Why? Because it’s also a science channel, and a history channel, and as for culture, technology, society, practical skills, consumer information, anthropology (the list could go on and on), it’s got those bases covered too. This is a cooking channel for people who appreciate that good cooking encompasses so much more than a list of ingredients and a method.

I absolutely love and hate when people make advertisements so smooth.

This is a surprise for me. I'm french, but my father being from Britany, I grew up using salted butter, thinking the rest of the world was using unsalted butter. I'm an exception in the exception 🤣 Just discovered your channel, I'm not cooking a lot, but I love how you prepare your videos, it's very interesting !

I once got popcorn with unsalted butter at a fancy movie theater. As someone that has shared popcorn with small children, it was very reminiscent of the popcorn they had rejected and put back in the bowl to traumatize me 😆 I always have salted butter for bread and popcorn. I'll cook with either though, I don't care.

I started cutting down on salt when I was diagnosed with hypertension. It's amazing how quickly my sense of "salty enough" changed. Not unlike my loss of taste for sweets that came with adolescence.

Ok, now I wonder if butter is an instrument.

it's very interesting to see this whole episode about unsalted butter and the things you might not know about it and why people use it and I just grew up using unsalted butter all the time because my granma has high blood pressure. I'm also allergic to milk.

French Parisian gal here, I’ve mostly grown up with unsalted butter. Very standard in the school menus, hotel breakfasts, etc. Salted is not what I’m used to, but it’s nice every now and then. But you’ll recognize a proud Brittany fellow by their attachment to salted butter. My biggest butter culture shock was when I moved to Ireland and grabbed just any random bar of butter in the dairy aisle. OMG I was wholly unprepared for UNPASTEURIZED butter, and just couldn’t eat it. Turns out it’s quite standard over there. Near all dairy is pasteurized by default in France, so most French kids don’t even know the taste of raw milk, including myself. I stick to pasteurized butter, but whether it’s salted or not is quite trivial to me.

As a Dutchman, I never even knew salted butter existed before I went on vacation to the UK. Nowadays supermarkets will have plenty of salted butters in stock, but growing up, the regular 'real butter' was of the unsalted variety.

My nana said she'd rather die than eat unsalted butter when her doctor suggested to cut it out of her diet.

You're very articulate in your speech, and your videos are very well paced.

Does anyone else never refrigerate their butter?? I’ve only ever just left it out in the table

I just recently (well a few years ago) even heard of the fact that salted butter exists. My whole childhood and most of my adult life, butter was always unsalted. In Germany, it is more common for me to distinguish between cultured ("mild gesäuert") and uncultured ("Süßrahm") butter.

In Sweden salted butter is a lot more common than unsalted

I really love your Videos you're combining the greatest things ever cooking science history and the philosophy behind all that

Now that you mentioned India, not just ghee but unsalted butter has been big in india since ancient times. French didn’t start to make it. Check out all the childhood stories of Krishna and you will find him so fond of unsalted butter (not ghee) that he even used to steal it just to be scolded by his mom. Additionally, there is a ancient sweet ‘makhan Mishri’ meaning plain butter and crystal sugar and has been used as an offering to Krisha since ancient times.

As a French and Britton, I'm a bit surprised by the historical reason she gives about unsalted butter. Up until now most region in France use unsalted butter except Brittany. And that is due to the introduction at some point of the "gabelle" which was a tax on salt and Brittany was exempt from this tax.

Adam, from what I remember (I'm living in France.) The king put taxes though various things, and, in among others, salt. There was a notable exception, Britanny didn't had that tax. So while in the rest of France, unsalted butter was rising in popularity, Britanny developed his now well known salted butter tradition. It's great butter.

My salt tolerance is waaaaaaay higher than most others. The food I cook for myself is often considered inedible by the masses lol. So if I do cook for other people I have to cut my salt input by a lot. Idk how much exactly, but a lot. I also use salted butter almost exclusively. I may have a problem 🤔🧂🧂🧂🧂🧈

"We're not building a bridge here, we are just cooking our own dinners" That's one of my all time favorite sentences. Love your videos and the food I've made from watching them.

I buy salted. I keep a stick in a butter dish, on the counter. Even in the summer. It stays soft, and doesn't go rancid.

2:27 RIP Land'o'Lakes Butter Maiden, 1928-2020. You will live on in our hearts. I remember her as my introduction to the concept of recursion, because in the older art from the 90's she was holding a box of butter that looked exactly like the actual package. Meaning the package had a picture of itself on it, and that picture had a smaller picture of itself on that. Butter Maidens all the way down. It was a beautiful piece of art and product design.

I had salted butter instead of unsalted butter delivered by mistake this week. I have had a week of screwing up the salt levels of everything I cooked. It could have been no problem but I just haven’t used salted since I was flatting with roommates in my late teen years (very early 1980s). Thus I kept forgetting to alter long memorized recipes to account for salt. Grrrr. So, choose salted or unsalted and stick with it long term & you’ll make your later 50s’ cooking easier! So much good info in this video.

Just ran into this-- Hello Algorithm! Excellent take. Practical, and tasteful!! Love it.

As a french person, seeing "President" referred as a high class brand is quite hilarious :p

As a professional cook I've always thought the difference was negligible. I found this video while proving a point. Very good break down , subbing cuz you deserve it. Keep up the good work

I love how you naturally brought it right back to your sponsor by telling people to make their own recipe web site :)

gotta appreciate clean transitions into the ad read

4:37 Adam likes living life on the edge. Seriously dude, 2%?

Hi from France! Here, salted butter is called "Demi-sel" (literally "Half salt"). I guess that's because companies decided to put less salt in salted butter for the mentioned reasons (not needed with refrigerators, and fancier), and now the "Full salt" butter is gone

I think Adam has seriously managed to become my favourite cooking channel. It teaches you to stop looking at food in a pendatic rigid way, which is great! Keep up the good work, buddy!

I really like this video! The suggestion to use unsalted butter to spread on bread and then add salt to taste is a great idea. I always use Diamond Crystal kosher salt. It tastes better and takes a lot less than regular salt when sprinkled on food, probably because it dissolves faster. However, it is about half as dense as regular salt so you should use twice as much when following a recipe like cooking rice.

As a Scandinavian I didn’t know unsalted butter existed until I was 20. Always thought the butter sold as normal salted was butter with no extra salt added.

"This longboat isn't going to row itself back to Denmark, Bjorn!" Feeling attacked. :D

Just discovering your channel. Brilliant!

Very informative, Adam Cheers Rob

Salted Butter: "In a perfect world, butter like me would not exist. But this is not a perfect world."

I had no idea that Markiplier and Alton brown had a child together, his voice is almost to close to that of Alton Brown, almost pushing copyright laws given the show's similarity to Alton Brown's show, "Good Eats"

I found out about this channel of the cook markplier recently and i'm addicted to it. Really good content

When I think of salted and unsalted butter I think of salted butter being used to cook savory food and unsalted butter used for baking or making more sweet foods.

OMG... Adam, I have been putting salt on my buttered bread for the last 25 years. Finally, you're someone that understands what I'm doing. Well done and thank you.

God I can't enjoy my break without one math problem

Bro, Adam's ad segue is always SO SMOOTH.

I swear Adam has the smoothest ad transitions on the internet

Thanks for the great video Daddy Adam

I'm simply not keeping a redundant ingredient for the sake of a slice of bread.

Mr. Ragusea, I can not thank you enough for this video. I have questioned the difference for years and have had many conversations in the kitchen about it. Thank you for doing all that math so I never have to! I feel so educated now! Thank you! And yeah, no one should have a problem with Julia! Nope

I approve your usage of the data metrics you get in order to strengthen your point. Yay!

I've been slowly switching to ghee in recent months and I'm not regretting it. It's a little offputting at times when you open the jar and get a very strong smell; almost too strong. The flavor mellows out a bit though and it usually works out. It's not exactly like butter but the difference has either been negligible or positive. Edit: Also, use whatever butter you want. Just don't make me eat margarine.

"and this long boat doesn't gonna row itself back to Denmark, Bjorn!" Bjorn: but, i just wanted to be friend with Askellad

Portuguese here. Salted butter is the standard here. Unsalted butter can be found for sale nowadays but, it's not for granted.