Here's How Many Sticks Of Butter Are In One Cup
Say you're planning a decadent dinner of grilled steaks topped with a blue cheese compound butter. The recipe calls for a cup of butter, but all you have in your refrigerator is a box of cold, hard sticks. Short of storing your butter at room temperature and waiting hours for it to be soft enough to fill your measuring cup, how do you know how many sticks of butter are in one cup?
Fortunately for home cooks, this conversion is actually pretty simple: Your standard box of four sticks of butter is 1 pound, meaning that each stick equals ¼ pound or 115 grams. Each stick of butter — regardless of whether it's one of the East Coast's long, skinny sticks or the West's short, fat ones — equals ½ cup or 8 tablespoons. That math means that for a cup of butter, you'll need two sticks. Note that most butter producers wrap sticks in paper with lines that indicate tablespoons and fractions of a cup; this makes it easy to simply slice the sticks to portion out exactly the amount you need.
What if your butter isn't so easy to measure?
Occasionally, you may find that butter comes in blocks rather than sticks, isn't wrapped in paper with clearly marked measurements, or isn't shaped into perfect blocks or sticks. What then?
There are a couple other ways to measure a cup of butter, even if it's not soft enough to press into a measuring cup. First, if you have a kitchen scale, it might be helpful to remember that 1 cup is the same as two sticks or half a pound. Therefore, you could measure out half a pound, which is 8 ounces. Many restaurant kitchens that get their butter in large blocks instead of sticks use grams; in that case, two sticks of butter equal 227 grams or one half block.
Finally, if all else fails, you could use the water-displacement method. Just fill a 2-cup measuring cup with water up to the 1-cup mark. Then begin adding butter, which is not water-soluble, so it will displace the water. When you have one cup of butter, the water will reach the two-cup mark. Just remove the butter, lightly pat it dry, and voila! You have a cup of butter.