18 TYPES OF BUTTER FOR BAKING

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.

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.

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.

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 cake or mashed potatoes.

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.

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 berries or add flavor to dishes like zucchini noodles with tomato butter sauce.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 walnuts or 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.

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. 

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 like strawberry oatmeal breakfast muffins or braided challah bread.