Looking for a natural alternative to margarine spreads? Here’s how you can make your own spreadable butter, with ingredients available from your local supermarket. The recipe makes 1 cup of spread. It can be easily doubled with my mini-choppers. I let the olive oil cut the total salt in half as well as make the butter spreadable from the fridge. If I only had the unsalted sticks, I’d look up the usual amount of sodium per serving in my favorite commercial spread, and figure out how much salt to duplicate that, so its not too bland.
Spreadable Butter Recipe
- 1 stick salted butter
- 1/2 cup light olive oil (I use Bertolli light)
chop the stick of butter into quarters with knife and put into mini-chopper so blades can catch the quarters (I use a power pod on top of glass bowl type or ninja prep) Add the light olive oil (light olive oil has very little flavor of its own) and let sit for a little while, so butter softens a little, then blend, remove chopper blades and pour or scrape with rubber spatula into glass pyrex serving container with lid and refrigerate immediately for a couple hours before usage.
Update — Recipe worked fine with the addition of 2 tablespoons of water. Maybe more like commercial spreads. Thanks again, Peter_W.
Thanks Peter_W for your comments. I was interested in reducing the saturated fats compared to butter, not necessarily reducing the calories per volume. Next time I can try the water or other oils suggestions.
Hey cookin_guy. Just a couple of suggestions –
Light olive oil is highly refined which is why it doesn't have much taste. This refining removes much of the nutritional value that might make you want use olive oil. There are other neutral tasting oils that have much better nutritional value, for example rice bran oil. You might want to try a small batch using this.
Light margarine spreads typically have a high water content. They are a stable emulsion of water and margarine, whipped to increase the volume. This is one of the reasons they have a low calorie count per tbsp. Your blending process is probably capable of making a stable water emulsion. You might consider an experiment – try adding 2 tbsp water and see if you get it to form an emulsion. If you are successful you will have lowered the calories a bit probably without affecting the taste or texture of the spread.