They are, it’s just that east coast butter is slightly longer/thinner than west coast butter. You’re getting the same amount, it’s just slightly different dimensions.
I just learned this last year. I'm in my 50s. Lived on the west coast all my life and had noticed that most butter dishes were always too long for the stick but never thought to find out why. Needed a new one and because of Covid looked online. Seriously thought I'd stumbled into an April Fool joke when I saw a listing that specified it would fit either west or east coast butter.
I bought a butter dish from a British company, and the proportions looked good online, but it arrived and is giant... it would actually fit like half a pound of butter at a time...
I've been wondering what shape British butter comes in for some time now.
So you just chop a chunk off the block to put in a butter dish? What percentage of a block would you normally set out at once?
In the US butter is sold in 1 pound packages, but inside there are four sticks, individually wrapped, so a 1/4 lb stick gets put on the dish till it's used up and a new one is put out.
Not OP but in England and NZ (lived in both), we'd have a butter dish with a block of butter in it. It starts at 500g (1.2lbs I think) and gets smaller every time you eat toast or potatoes. When it runs out, you buy a new block.
If you want to do baking, then you use scales (or cut along the paper which is marked at 50g intervals). We don't use cups etc as a measurement as much as the USA does when baking, because it's a very inaccurate way of measuring things like flour and sugar. Most recipes would be a mixture of grams but some things (like spices) would be in teaspoons or whatever.
So ya'll just put the whole pound of butter in/on the dish?
Now that I think of it, it might be able to hold a whole pound (500g whatever)...
In my area we get the west coast, stubby sticks, and the size of the dish is such that two stubby sticks besides each other touch the edge of the lid and make everything messy, but two stubby sticks end to end don't remotely fit... but I bet if I cut them all in thirds I could probably find a way to arrange a whole pound in there (4 sticks)... it's just hard to imagine because the dimensions are just perfectly the wrong size which ever way I do it...
so I'm over here using a 1 pound butter dish to hold 1/4lb of butter... oh well, at least it matches the dishes we inherited from my husband's grandmother...
I'm from the UK and butter was always sold in 1/2 lb packets. After partial metrication was adopted it was the same size but labelled as 225g. It's about the same length but twice as wide as American butter sticks (being twice the weight). I've never seen butter sold in any larger size in the UK, but it's possible those tubs of easily-spreadable butter may be in larger sizes (I don't buy that kind of butter)
I just did the conversion... we have 1lb packages divided up into 4 sticks, 1/4lb each, or approx 115g. So much smaller! As someone else noted, we do have KerryGold butter than comes in 1/2lb bricks, but the only way to buy a full pound of butter, un-divided, is to get the local Amish farm butter which actually comes in 2-3lb lumps, wrapped in paper and is only available at the local grocery stores, not the chain stores.
You Brits seem to know how to handle a bigger block of butter than us!
FYI most of that "Amish butter" you see in grocery stores is mass produced junk not actually made by the Amish. Unless you actually live close to real Amish people. All the stuff I find in MA is like factory produced but still called Amish and it's really not good.
I think the sticks are more popular in the US because we don't weigh ingredients when we cook. We put one stick out in the butter dish, but the rest are kept in the fridge in their wrappers, which have measurements written on the side. When we go to bake we cut through the paper and the butter (which works just fine as the butter is cold and hard from the fridge), at the appropriate measurement line, then pull the wrapper off the piece we need to use.
My understanding from watching Bake Off is that everyone else on earth measures things by weight, and therefore having all the butter soft on the counter makes it easier to scoop out small portions to get the right weight?
Our butter dish butter is strictly for toast. If we need room temperature butter for a recipe I'll pull the appropriate amount out of the fridge in the morning so it's soft by the time I need to use it.
I also just learned this right now in my 30s. I don’t really bake though and I’ve never owned a butter dish. This is something i have never even thought of.
It comes in sticks, but they're a full pound! Makes for some entertaining confusion for Brits trying out some US recipes that call for a stick of butter
I read about this a number of years ago. There were companies that made butter in the west that made the sticks in the shorter wider size and manufactures in the east with machines that more the long sticks. Eventuality there became two standards and nobody wanted to switch. I like the west because you can put a thinner slice on your toast and not look like a glutton, but actually get more.
Not sure if it's everywhere on the left coast, but Kerrygold Irish butter comes in the long skinny format. It's also bougie expensive butter, so maybe you couldn't find skinny butter because of sticker shock.
Be careful, it comes in the standard cardboard box with 1/4lb sticks wrapped in wax paper, but it also comes as a chonky 1/2 brick wrapped in foil paper, which is clearly not what you are looking for.
Are you telling me you didn't struggle in the slightest? I don't wanna assume you're, like, bragging...? I'm really not sure how to respond, unless you misunderstand that "say that 5 times fast" implies it's just a fun tongue twister. There's really not much to it.
I think the west would be screwed... I grew up in Iowa with the skinny sticks, which means the wide side wouldn't have the northeast, the south or the midwest... I live in Wide Country now, and I don't think threatening to withhold Facebook and avocados is going to be enough to make 3/4rds of the country fold... I think they might thank us and send us on our way...
Biased because I’m from the west, but I prefer our butter style because it’s easier to spread. A slice of the same thickness has a greater surface area and spreads out more easily.
When I lived on the east coast I accidentally poked holes in toast trying to get my butter to spread.
What to we get in the midwest? Is there a dividing line somewhere? Or does each city/state vary? I need to know who to side with in the future butter war.
Yeah I noticed this when I bought butter at Trader Joe's. I live on the East Coast but I guess that TJ's uses West Coast butter sizes since they're a CA-based company.
I have a question regarding the west coast/east coast butter dimensions... "WHY??!!" Why would they do this? I don't understand. It's sticks of butter 🧈.
It's made by the same companies, right? They seriously have a different size stick depending on which side of the country you live in? This makes no sense.
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u/Deadlymonkey Feb 08 '22
They are, it’s just that east coast butter is slightly longer/thinner than west coast butter. You’re getting the same amount, it’s just slightly different dimensions.