Most chefs and cooking instruction books say to use unsalted butter. Most home cooks tend to opt for salted butter. Salted butter has more flavor and will taste better when you smear it on your bread. Salt brings out the flavor in foods, including butter. Knowing this, why should you follow foodie instructions and use unsalted butter, instead?
Reasons To Use Unsalted Butter
Whether to use unsalted butter depends a lot on the type of cooking you’re doing. Here are some of the top reasons given for choosing unsalted:
- So you can control the amount of salt that goes into the dish
- Because unsalted butter is inferior, lower-grade butter (the salt is added as a coverup)
- Salted butter contains more water than unsalted butter
Let’s look at all these reasons, in turn.
Use Unsalted Butter So You Can Control the Amount of Salt in the Dish
Salted butter can contain anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5% added salt. This will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. So, there is some wisdom in the idea. However, this matters more when writing precise recipes in cookbooks than it does for the home cook.
Since a cookbook writer can’t know what the salt percentage in your butter will be and recipes often call for precise amounts of salt, it’s better to use unsalted butter when perfecting a recipe so that varying salt amounts in salted butter don’t throw off the results. This explains why some recipes call for unsalted butter.
If you’re a home cook who tastes your food as you go, it won’t matter as much. You will be adjusting the amount of salt to your taste preference, anyway. If the salt makes it saltier, you’ll add less salt.
Also, not all recipes call for a specific amount of salt. Some just say ‘salt to taste.’ In these recipes, it won’t matter as much whether you use salted or unsalted butter.
I’ve seen some fairly ‘theoretical claims’ attached to this idea. One is that all that salt masks the flavor of that sweet cream butter. It covers up the sweetness. Salt doesn’t cover up sweetness, it enhances it.
Unless salted butter had so much salt that it overwhelmed the butter taste, the salt is likely to bring out the flavor and make it taste sweeter. One statement, in this regard, struck me as bordering on magical thinking:
…the addition of salt can mask most of that sweetness and also the creamy flavor of natural butter. Using unsalted butter allows the natural flavor to meld with the other ingredients in baked goods to get that famous “buttery” flavor. 1Davis, Jonita. “What Is the Highest Quality Butter for Baking?” Our Everyday Life, 10 Jan. 2019, oureverydaylife.com/highest-quality-butter-baking-35950.html.
So, if you use unsalted butter, it will mask the sweetness and not allow the natural flavor to meld. If you add salt to the dish, this salt is magic, and doesn’t mask the flavor of the butter and doesn’t keep the butter from melding with the other ingredients. I’m not sure how this all works…
Salted Butter is Inferior Lower-Grade Butter
In these conspiracy-minded times, this is the kind of factoid food writers work into their information to grab us and convince us of the superiority of one ingredient over another. The idea that the dairy industry is foisting lower-grade butter on us by adulterating it with salt to disguise the lower quality should be more convincing than the other common reasons given.
Well, I have an even more intriguing conspiracy for you. Salted butter is just as likely to bear the U.S. Grade AA seal as unsalted butter. Grade AA is the highest grade of butter. Both grade AA and Grade A are available in supermarkets across the U.S., but grade AA butter is generally easier to find than grade A. Grade B butter is reserved for manufacturing.
That’s why I used the word conspiracy. If salted butter is of lower quality then both the dairies and the USDA are lying about the quality grades.
According to the USDA, here are the specifications for Grade AA butter and Grade A butter, respectively:
U.S. Grade AA butter conforms to the following: Possesses a fine and highly pleasing butter flavor. May possess a slight feed and a definite cooked flavor. It is made from sweet cream of low natural acid to which a culture (starter) may or may not have been added. The permitted total disratings in body, color, and salt characteristics are limited to onehalf (½). For detailed specifications and classification of flavor characteristics see Table I, and for body, color, and salt characteristics and disratings see Table II.
U.S. Grade A butter conforms to the following: Possesses a pleasing and desirable butter flavor. May possess any of the following flavors to a slight degree: Acid, aged, bitter, coarse, flat, smothered, and storage. May possess feed flavor to a definite degree. The permitted total disratings in body, color, and salt characteristics are limited to one-half (½), except, when the flavor classification is AA, a disrating total of one (1) is permitted. For detailed specifications and classification of flavor characteristics see Table I, and for body, color, and salt characteristics and disratings see Table II.
Some states, like Wisconsin, may have their own butter grading standards. Wisconsin’s standards are even more stringent.
Salted Butter Contains More Water Than Unsalted Butter
Butter, in general, will contain from 13 to 19 percent water. The rest, 80% by law, is fat, and the remainder is milk solids like protein and lactose.
It’s true that salted butter will tend to contain more water. Like the salt claim, above, this may not make a difference in your everyday cooking but it may be the best reason yet to stick with unsalted butter.
The additional water will make the biggest difference in baking, which is why baking recipes will almost always call for unsalted butter. This will matter a lot in pie crusts and could really affect cookies made with butter.
So, What’s the Answer? Unsalted Butter or Not?
If you are confused, I’ll give you my opinion, based on all of the above. For pie crusts, I would definitely opt for unsalted butter (and very cold butter). But I’m terrible at making pie crusts so salt in butter is the least of my worries. You may want to opt for unsalted butter in other baking if you’re a serious baker.
But if you like the butter you use for topping to have some salt in it, then keep using unsalted butter. I doubt you want to have two different types of butter on hand. And, I doubt very much that you will really notice a difference in your cooking whether you use salted butter or unsalted butter. Always taste as you cook and adjust the salt as you go.
If you are an inexperienced cook and need to follow recipes precisely, then you should probably use unsalted butter when it is specified.
If you are more confident in your ability to improvise, then use whatever you have on hand or prefer to use. Usually, you will do well with the ingredients you are used to using.