We Taste-Tested 13 Supermarket Salted Butters—Here Are Our Favorites

I look back now and I laugh: How naive I was! To think we could publish an unsalted butter taste test and just walk away from it assuming you would be happy. I remember the day I hit ‘publish’ and the relief I felt as I crossed another item off my to-do list. But that was quickly followed by annoyed Instagram comments, and then the exasperated emails rolled in. You…you prefer salted butter. Because our preference is almost always to cook with unsalted butter, we forgot that eating it is much more pleasurable when there's salt involved.

Here's the good news: I've now made everyone eat a disgusting amount of salted butter. 

On a recent test kitchen day, the SE team pulled together 13 brands of salted butter that you're likely to find in your local supermarket, and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best. And we had a delicious blast doing it. I hope you enjoy our findings! (Said without a hint of saltiness, I promise.)

The Contenders

• Amish Country Butter, Salted, Roll
• Breakstone's All Natural Salted Butter
• Cabot Salted Butter Quarters
• Challenge Butter, Salted
• Finlandia Imported Butter, Perfectly Salted
• Grassland Non-GMO, Salted Sweet Cream Butter
• Kerrygold Butter, Pure Irish
• Land O’Lakes Butter, Salted
• Nature’s Promise Organic Sweet Cream Butter Salted Sticks
• Plugrà Premium European Style Salted Butter
• Truly Grass Fed Natural Creamy Irish Butter, Salted
• Urban Meadows Salted Butter 
• Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter With Sea Salt

The Criteria

A good salted butter is—wait for it—salty. That saltiness shouldn’t overwhelm the butter's dairy sweetness (with or without a cultured tang), but it should highlight it in pleasantly seasoned bursts.

To assess the butters, testers evaluated each in randomized order and without knowing which brands were which. They scored the butters on specific criteria like flavor, aroma, and texture, as well as overall preference.

Butters were allowed to sit at room temperature for one hour before tasting to take the chill off and make spreading on bread possible. We didn’t want the color of the butter to affect anyone’s opinion, so we flipped all the buttered bread upside down and conducted the tasting without peeking at the product underneath. As always, this is important work that I took very seriously, annoying no one at all during the process.

The Big Picture

Similarly to the unsalted butter taste test, we concluded that…we like almost all salted butter! 

While the below results are ranked in order of score, all the samples' average scores fell within a narrow 1.5-point range, which means there was not a dramatic difference from one to the next (this was also true in our unsalted butter taste test). Our top-ranking selections were packed with positive notes from testers, but everything toward the “bottom” got, at most, few gently, minimally critical notes.

One interesting difference from our unsalted butter taste test was that, with the noteworthy exception of the highest-scored butter, all our other top selections overwhelmingly had at least 82% butterfat, making them all fall under the umbrella of “European-style butter.” This indicates that the presence of salt, which is a "flavor enhancer," makes other qualities of the butter more pronounced—the muted flavors of unsalted butter apparently made it more difficult to suss out qualities like fat percentage that, in theory, might correlate with perceptions of quality. With salt added, that was less the case.

As for aroma, we found it to be a less preference-defining quality across these samples than we did with the unsalted butters, but mild nature smells (grass, mushrooms, cream) were received well by tasters. 

It’s worth noting we’d hoped to include Vital Farms (our unsalted winner!), Kate’s, Isigny Ste Mère Beurre D'Isigny, Les Prés Salés, Hotel Bar, and Organic Valley butters, but could not find them across four supermarkets. 

TL;DR: Salted butter—it’s good! Wild out in a salted butter aisle near you!

The Rankings

80.6% butterfat
The way I triple-checked to make sure this was the butter everyone was raving about!! “Grassy and fresh,” Kelli wrote: “This tastes like exactly what you want first thing in the morning.” It reminded Genevieve “of a really nice butter you get at a French restaurant, bread basket and all.” Jordan “loved everything about this butter.” No one explicitly made note of the salt content of this butter, so I’m going to assume it was neither too salty nor too not-salty, but instead quietly just right (very much a Goldilocks moment as far as salted butters go).

82% butterfat
And just like that, saltiness entered the equation! Not only did most everyone call out an ideal salt-to-sweet ratio, but they also enjoyed the clean, cultured flavor of this butter. It “might be the only one I actually want to eat consistently out of the pack,” per Genevieve.

84-85% butterfat
There’s a lot to love about anything edible that makes its way to you in the form and size of a sunshine-y yellow cylindrical brick. Of course, my coworkers did not know this was said brick while eating it, but this Amish offering yielded the most interesting tasting notes. Daniel called it “slightly barnyardy,” (affectionately, I think?), while Genevieve said it tasted “halfway to garlic bread.” Kelli called it floral, noting it was “the most complex flavor [she] experienced during this test,” and Jordan tasted lemon in each bite. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Megan’s fantastically scathing “this tastes like salty fridge” note, but others’ rankings were so high it didn’t nudge this placement down.

82% butterfat
Not only did salt hit hard in this sample, but the butter tasted creamy and nutty to most testers, some of whom said they felt nostalgic eating it.

82% butterfat
Tasters noted that this butter had salt woven through it in seeming ribbons, rather than spread evenly throughout. It was milky! It was creamy! It was fancy-feeling! It was a really nice option!

82% butterfat
All testers pointed to a pleasant fatiness present in their beloved Kerrygold (really—this team talks organically about their fondness for Kerrygold a lot). Mentions of fresh movie theater popcorn, rich olive oil, and unskimmed cream, etc. It's a lovely option with a rich texture.

82% butterfat
“Nice and salty!” Genevieve wrote. In fact, this butter saw the most instances of “salty!” written verbatim throughout testing notes. Do you like salt? Do you like butter? You will like this salty butter!

82-83% butterfat
One of the very few butters with a smell described by those who noticed it as distinctly “buttery.” There are worse things to be called than buttery, if you're a block of butter.

“At least 80% butterfat”
Megan was the first one to describe this butter as “quite salty,” while Daniel took it to: “maybe too salty!” Still, it tasted neutral and not not as rich as some of the other butters in this tasting, likely due to it being on the lower end of the butterfat spectrum.

Not much to say here except it's a totally neutral option for those looking to eat a lot of salty butter but not feel like they are digesting a ton of salty butter; once again, lower butterfat is probably to thank for this being the overarching description.

80% butterfat
Many enjoyed this butter's smoothness. Kelli mentioned she would be hesitant to add more salt if she were cooking with this, though no one else pointed to the salt level as too much.

80% butterfat
Very mild and pleasant. Softened quickly, spread easily. Sunk into my hands like molten lava cake when I attempted to put it back in the fridge around four-and-a-half hours at room temp. That’s OK! I love for colleagues to see my laptop and think: “Ew!”

80% butterfat
Despite its 80% butterfat, three tasters described this as a “clearly fatty” butter. Urban Meadows also came through sweeter than it did salty to many. That’s also OK! I love for my colleagues to think: “Did she mix up the taste tests? On purpose??” I ate six baguette bites coated in this stuff just to feel something.

Our Testing Methodology

All taste tests are conducted completely hidden and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria that vary from sample to sample. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.

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