Did you find your favourite brand of butter on offer and you’ve gone a bit mad buying tubs of the stuff? Or perhaps you just like to have a stash so you never run out. Well, what’s the best way to store butter?
Can You Freeze Butter?
Yes, you can freeze butter for up to 4 months. You can freeze all sorts of butter including spreadable butter and flavoured butter.
Do Does Butter freeze well? Yes
Can you refreeze Butter? No
How To Freeze Butter
First and foremost, you need to make sure the butter is in date. Secondly, if you haven’t opened the butter and plan to defrost it in one go, keep it in the original packaging.
This will be one of the best ways to protect the butter. If you’re freezing it as one block, then you can actually go ahead and toss it into the freezer as it is.
If, however, you want to freeze your butter into portions (slicing a block of frozen butter is hard after all), then read on:
- Portion: First, decide what portion sizes you would like to freeze your butter in and slice your butter into sticks accordingly. Try not to freeze portions that are too small as they’ll become too fragile. Cut your butter into those portions.
- Wrap: Wrap your butter in a layer of clingfilm or foil, and then place this into an airtight container.
- Freeze: Finally, place this in the freezer.
Clingfilm followed by an airtight container might seem overboard, but butter will easily absorb odours from your freezer. The last thing you want to do is bake a cake with onion and garlic infused butter!
How to Freeze Flavoured Butter
Having flavour-packed butter, such as lemon butter, ready to go from the freezer can be an easy and sure-fire way of adding instant flavour to any dish.
You can toss a round of flavoured butter into roasted vegetables, place a piece on top of steaks or stir it through some boiled veggies.
Before you get to freezing your flavoured butter, you’ll need to know a batch of it together. Allow your butter to soften for an hour or so, then give it a good beat. When it is creamy, stir in your flavourings and give it a final beat to combine.
You then need to place it onto a sheet of clingfilm. Roll this into a sauce, then tie the ends before placing it in the freezer.
If you’re not sure what flavourings to try, then here are some examples. The quantities are based on using 100g of unsalted butter:
- Garlic and Herb Butter: 2tbsp chopped fresh parsley and 1 crushed garlic clove
- Tomato and Basil Butter: 2tbsp chopped basil and 1tbsp chopped sundried tomato
- Asian-Inspired Butter: Zest of 1 lime, 1 chopped red chilli, 2tbsp chopped coriander and 1 crushed garlic clove (and you could also add a little grating of ginger in here)
- Mustard Butter: Just 2tbsp of wholegrain mustard – that’s it!
Now you have a range of flavoured butter you can easily knock together, it’s time to learn how to freeze them. If you only make a small batch, they will keep it in the fridge for around a week.
We’re going to assume you’ve followed the instructions above and have got your flavoured butter wrapped in the shape of a sausage and tied off at both ends to protect it from the air.
Now, you have two options: You can freeze it as a whole sausage, or you can freeze it in rounds. The former is quicker but can make grabbing a portion a little more effort.
The latter will take a little more work now but will make grabbing a little round of flavoured butter a doddle.
If you’re going to freeze the whole sausage of flavoured butter, then you can actually go ahead and toss that into the freezer now. If you want to freeze individual rounds, then follow these instructions:
- Line Baking Tray: First, prepare a baking tray by lining it with greaseproof paper to prevent the butter from sticking.
- Slice: Slice the flavoured butter into rounds about 1cm thick and place straight onto your baking tray, ensuring none of the rounds touch one another.
- Flash Freeze: Place the tray into the freezer for a few hours until the rounds are frozen solid.
- Bag Up: Remove them from the freezer, tip into a container or freezer bag, and then label with the butter’s flavour, so you know what flavour you’re grabbing in the future.
- Freeze: Return to the freezer.
If you have a little time on your hands to flash freeze and store in ready-to-use rounds, then this is the approach we would highly recommend taking.
3 Tips for Freezing Butter
Now you know how to freeze butter, we’ve got our 3 top tips which we strongly recommend following when freezing it to have the best results:
Try Flavours
Freezing flavoured butter works really well. It enables you to instantly add bags of flavour to a variety of dishes with minimal effort.
Wrap Tightly
You need to do all you can to ensure the butter is stored airtight. This will prevent it from degrading but (more importantly) stop it from absorbing odours from within the fridge.
Use from the Freezer
If you are dressing vegetables or flavouring meat that you’re going to cook in the oven, don’t bother to thaw it beforehand. Use it straight from the freezer!
How Long Can You Freeze Butter?
You can actually freeze butter for up to a year. However, after around 4 months, the taste can degrade, and there’s a greater risk that the butter will become exposes to other odours in your freezer.
That’s why we’d recommend limiting it to 4 months in the freezer.
Butter will last in the tub it was bought in for between 1 and 3 months or until the use-by date on the packaging.
How Do You Defrost Butter?
Defrosting butter comes down to how you plan on using it. If you want to cook with it or if you want to dress warm vegetables in your butter, then you can use it straight from the freezer without defrosting it.
If you want to use it in a cake and need to cream it together with sugar, you will need to defrost it, unfortunately. The best approach for defrosting butter is to place it in the fridge overnight.
You can actually use the defrost function on your microwave if you’re in a rush. The preferred approach is to defrost it in the fridge, however.
Once defrosted, it will actually keep for up to 30 days in the fridge, so there’s no major rush to use it.
Can You Refreeze Butter?
Although butter does freeze well and it should remain safe to refreeze, it’s not something we would advise doing. There’s a risk that you will ruin the texture of any butter you attempt to refreeze.
It can split and dry out, which is not what you will want with butter.
Instead, try to freeze butter in suitably sized portions to make it easier to thaw little and often.
Does Butter Freeze Well?
The good news is that butter does freeze well if you take the time to freeze it correctly. If you toss it into the freezer, loosely wrapped in a bit of clingfilm, then chances are the flavour will degrade rapidly, and it’ll absorb every odour in the freezer.
Before you know it, you’ve got fishy, onion-infused butter… And who wants that!
If you do take time to wrap it tightly and then store it in an airtight container, it will freeze well, and you’ll be able to use it how you would normally use butter.
Related FAQs
If you’ve still got questions about freezing butter or butter in general, then these may help:
Much like butter, olive oil spreads such as Bertolli can also be frozen. It can be frozen for up to 3 months without any noticeable changes in texture or flavour. If you’ve bought a tub, then you can actually place it straight into the freezer as is.
Generally, spreadable butter is simply butter blended with a little vegetable oil to help soften it up. This means you can freeze spreadable butter.
