The Genius Trick To Make Cold Butter Toast-Ready

It happens to the best of us. You've sliced your bread and toasted it too, only to find that your butter dish is empty. The only available butter is in the fridge, and nothing ruins toast faster than cold butter. An attempt to spread a cold pat of butter can result in tears, snags, and lumps of unevenly spread globs across your perfectly golden slice of bread. But no more, thanks to one nifty hack. All you'll need for this trick is a vegetable peeler, like this Kuhn Rikon Original Swiss one. Simply remove your cold butter from the fridge and "peel" it as you would, say, a carrot, rolling the blades along the butter stick lengthwise. This will cut your butter into thin and long strips. It really is one of the many creative ways to use a vegetable peeler.

Once sliced, you can place the butter onto your toasted bread, bagel, English muffin, and the like. And if you'd prefer smaller bits of butter, you can further slice or tear the strips into smaller pieces. What makes this method so effective is that it cuts butter into slices that are very thin. This allows the butter to melt easily into your bread. Using a vegetable peeler has the added benefit of making an even cut which will prevent large, unmelted clumps of butter from ruining your morning slice of toast. You will, of course, want to make sure your bread is still warm when you place the butter strips on it, otherwise they won't melt. 

Okay, but what if you have cold butter and no vegetable peeler? Good news! You need not despair as there are plenty of kitchen tools that can get the job done just as well. Microplanes, for example, can finely shred your cold butter into tiny, meltable strips. This will work especially well if you want the butter to melt quickly and evenly over your toast, as the grate of a microplane is very small. In fact, it's often used to shave foods such as truffle or nutmeg which require a great amount of precision. Simply grate your butter directly over your toasted bread and voila! You have a perfectly buttered piece of toast. 

You can also use a box grater in the same fashion, but it will give you less precise coverage of your bread. You can use either a small grate or a large one, though the latter will produce thicker curls of butter which might take longer to fully melt onto your bread. Grating butter is also a clever hack for baking that can lead to flakier bakes.

Now, if you aren't equipped with any of these tools, you can still use the basic principle of the hack. Since butter melts faster in smaller pieces, cut it into thin strips before placing it on your toast. And if you are toasting two slices of bread, you can place these tabs of butter between the slices. The trapped heat from the two will help your butter melt faster (all while buttering both slices). No matter what you do, never use a microwave — it's the absolute worst way to soften cold butter.