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Listen. I live in Canada, and butter is hard at room temperature from September through June because room temperature stays below 20. In fact, for at least a fe
by bregma 6y ago
Listen. I live in Canada, and butter is hard at room temperature from September through June because room temperature stays below 20. In fact, for at least a few days every year, even water gets hard in my kitchen. It is Cold here in winter.
Between hard butter and cold coffee/tea this is why every Canadian kitchen has a microwave. I have also come to think of the two summer months as 'soft butter season' because I can just spread it directly on my toast in the morning.
- permo-w 6y agoPerhaps I’m wrong, but my assumption is that the people making these complaints have central heating and aren’t just forgetting that it gets cold in Canada
- mewse-hn 6y agoAs another canadian: we all have central heating or we'd die, what GP is saying is that confirmation bias may be in play here because it's the dead of winter and butter is going to be harder than the summer months anyway.
- rini17 6y agoWow, I don't know anyone who actually has heating temp set below 20C. I have 21 myself at home and often get complaints it's too cold. (eastern europe) To stay ontopic, I completely gave up spreading the butter as it's stored in the fridge year round. Just cutting thin slices and laying them on the bread is ok.
- inanutshellus 6y agoY'all need to look into "butter keepers". It's two bowls. Put the butter in one bowl. Put a 1/4" of water in the other. Flip the butter-bowl upside down into the water-bowl. Leave it on your table. Voila. spreadable butter. If it's not spreadable (because you just got it out of the fridge or you keep your house chilly), because it's in a ceramic bowl you can just chop/squish/stir.
- a2tech 6y ago65F in our house here in Michigan (in the US). Thats ~18C. Our house was built in 1860 and leaks hot air like a sieve. We also get a noticeable breeze inside if the wind is from the west-southwest. On the butter front, we get it delivered from a local dairy and for about half the year its too hard for easy spreading. We keep it on the counter and I basically put a patty of it on my toast and then stick it back in the toaster oven for another 30 seconds while I get my peanut butter out.
- brnt 6y agoIts still found in travel guides for Eastern Europe: your hotel will be way too hot and there will be (probably) nothing you can do about it. That's nearly free Soviet gas for you ;) Meanwhile, here in the Netherlands, the gov advertises that 18 degrees is enough (19 is considered standard).
- scruffyherder 6y agoSoviet gas? It comes from a time machine?
- carlmr 6y agoWhat's considered normal could have been dialed in during that time and still persist.
- brnt 6y agoAs sibling says, the best explanation I have found is that it's a holdover from Soviet natural gas politics (and in fact continued by Russian gas politics, as countries such as Ukraine can attest).
- brnt 6y agoI (not Canadian) buy a butter that has some rapeseed oil mixed in, which makes it smearable well below 20C.
- washadjeffmad 6y agoPractical. I do some schmaltz cooking and will sometimes whip rendered tallow or chicken fat with butter. Because it's seasoned from the BBQ brisket or whatever dish it came from, the fat makes a great compound butter. It's also spreadable and great to spoon over vegetables, etc.
- dqpb 6y agoOne of the people arguing that butter is hard is “Sylvain Charlebois, senior director at Dalhousie University's Agri-Food Analytics Lab”. You should message them, tell them to turn their thermostat up.