Butter

Well, I suppose that unless I take a sudden interest in French cooking, 20# of butter should last a year, right? I mean, thats a quarter stick of butter every 5 days. Seems like plenty.

In my experience, freezing butter, as is, from the store with no special packaging other than what it comes with is fine. But…better safe than sorry, y’know? I’ll vacuum seal each 1# brick just to err on the side of overcautiousness.

Yeah, there’s canned butter out there. Good stuff to have, no doubt, in a prolonged emergency but for my day-to-day needs, the stuff I buy at CostCo will do fine. Of course, if I was stocking some remote cabin or somesuch it would be a different story.

Anyway, this stuff will go off to the deep freeze and we’ll see if it lasts to next December. I suspect it will.

22 thoughts on “Butter

  1. It should be fine….vac sealing it is not a bad idea. I’ve had butter pick up strange odors from the freezer.

    WRT canned butter, it’s very easy to make it at home…basically you clarify it and then can it (small jars like jelly jars are best). Lasts forever. The commercial canned butter is good too but pricey.

    • You’re right on the button about butter picking up odors. I stored a lot of butter as is in the deep freeze. A good many years back I started home brewing and was also storing hops in the same freezer. After a while the lovely missus and I noticed that the butter started tasting a bit funky. It almost had a vague rancid taste. Traced it down to the hops pellets. After that I stored the butter in Ziploc or Glad plastic containers and never had a problem again. Yeah, the bags of hops also went into containers. I’m sure that vacuum sealing would be even better.

      Speaking of vacuum sealing. The bags from Food Saver are a bit on the pricey side. I now get mine from a place called Commercial Bargains on Amazon. Fifty foot rolls cost the same as the 20 ft rolls of Food Saver bags. Same quality. I turned on a lot of friends to them.

      https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1_14?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=commercial+bargains+vacuum+sealer+bags&sprefix=commercial+bar%2Caps%2C141&crid=1A32NNR6UECEO

    • Do the same, clarify and store – it’s just Ghee which South Asians have used for millennia to keep in the climate. No refrigeration really necessary but I keep it in the storage fridge. The butter oil can be flavored as well with addition of spices during clarification process then strained out with the solids. Good stuff.

  2. Yup, it should be fine for a year or more in my humble opinion. I’ve used butter left forgotten in my freezer that was about ten months old and did not notice any difference in it and that was just frozen as is, without vacuum sealing.

  3. I’ve got costco butter, with no additional wrapper, in my deep freeze from several years ago. I’m not as good at rotating as I should be, so some is at least 3 years old. It’s just as good today as when I put it to sleep…. (I dug some out from the bottom of the freezer this week.) I like the 4 sticks of 4oz packaging, but the one pound sticks should be fine too. Vac seal can only help….

    n

  4. Shoulda bought 60lbs

    Why? That would seem excessive for a year

    I’d very much like to buy one of the Calamity Calendars that you employ, if you could tell me where to get one. I’d like to be able to predict the exact, or even approximate, day the one-year SHTF period will end so I’ll know when things will be back to normal.

    • So under your paradigm I should buy…what? 100#? 300#? An entire herd of cattle and a bus full of milkmaids to churn buttter?

      The point is to purchase a quantity and see if lasts the year.

      • Gotta say, if you have a scheme to get SWMBO to get on board with the part regarding “…a busload of milkmaids”, I’m in. You would be A GHAWD!

        in addition, if they could shoot, well, homestead defense would be enhanced… jes’ sayin’.

      • The point is to purchase a quantity and see if lasts the year.

        Valid metric, but do you not already have a “ballpark idea” of how much of Product X you use per year? If I’m using quantity Y of product X weekly/monthly/annually, I have some rough idea of average consumption rate per time unit.

        Taking butter as an example, I know I use some butter each month/year, and that – perhaps – it’s a semi-critical component of cooking and flavor-adding so I know I want to keep some on hand. I also know it stores well when frozen. So, if I run a 1-year consumption metric and it turns out that the figure is “20 lbs” I can reach the same determination point with 20 lbs in the freezer or 100 lbs. The difference is that upon conclusion of the evaluation one path leaves me with 0 lbs butter, the other leaves 80 lbs. Assuming that initial procurement was performed at a suitably low price, I’m either all set for ~48 months or I’m searching for a good deal on butter because I don’t have any.

        If it’s something I know I use (or need, or maybe just want) it seems reasonable to procure an extended supply should it become available at at attractive price. As for the buying the herd and hiring milkmaids, if you have the resources to support that operational burden, go for it. Worst case, the surplus milk/cream/butter is a revenue stream until SHTF, at which point (some of) the cows get transitioned into food and the milkmaids become field hands.

  5. We have both hole canned butter, and also store COSTCO butter in the freezer. Both taste just fine.
    And butter is one of those things that I think you cannot have too much of.

  6. I bought a whole bunch of red feather butter years ago and am still using it. If you shop around, you can get it for a more reasonable price (safecastle has it for $140 per 24 cans.) Don’t have to worry about the electricity going out.

  7. Wow, 20 lbs for a year. I must be doing something wrong. That’s only 5 months worth. We use a costco 4 lb package a month. Of course we look at butter and bacon as the backbone of a food supply, and build from there.

  8. Kids out of the house now but Baby and I still use a pound a week . We get raw organic milk from Amish friends for $1.50 a gallon and many times they pour from a pail that the cream has started rising and we get two quarts of cream in each gallon . Two quarts of cream will make around a pound of good butter . I like it best when the cream is ripened before making it into butter . We use it in nearly all cooking and especially gravies . So a pound a week is the rule around here !

  9. A quarter stick of butter rolled in cinnamon sugar will keep you very warm on a really cold day.

  10. I wouldn’t vacuum seal it. If there’s a leak, that just means it will pull in outside air and whatever funky odors are present. Just wrap the butter package in a freezer bag and zip it closed. Add some tape to the closure if you’re worried about the zip-lock closure.

    We put a lot of butter in the freezer here just to save money. Prices can vary over 150% over the course of the year, so we buy it cheap and unfreeze as needed.

Comments are closed.