A French girl once asked me, "Why is there no salt in your Norwegian butter?" This really got to me. It forced me to ask existential questions like, "Should there really be salt in butter?" But the fact is, putting salt in stuff is an old conservation method. Because of it, unsalted butter was looked upon as fresher, and thus of higher value when used as spread or in cooking. As far as I know, the idea of unsalted butter was actually popularized by French gourmands! But as newer and cleaner dairy production methods came about, the production of unsalted butter became more common. On top of that, the colder climate in Scandinavia means that unsalted butter keeps for longer than in warmer countries. So that's why Norwegian butter isn't salted. But yeah, as for the "grater knife;" I think it just made it to the top of my wish-list for Christmas!
But Norwegian butter is salted. It's just that you can also buy unsalted butter (and extra-salted butter, lactose-free butter (only sold in smaller 250g sizes while "normal" butter is also sold at 500g), and butter from sour cream. And a couple more. The salted variant is the "normal" butter (center in the picture in the link), the rest are variants. https://www.tine.no/merkevarer/tine-sm%C3%B8r/produkter/tine...
Salted butter is mostly used in the Brittany region of France, there's a joke that goes:
"How can you tell a girl from Brittany likes anal?
> She has unsalted butter in her fridge."
This is really interesting because here in Sweden pretty much everyone uses salted butter, you can buy unsalted but it’s not common at all.
The most popular sandwich spread (bregott, a mix of butter and rapeseed oil) comes in three main variants: “normally” salted, lightly salted, and extra salted.
Yes! In Sweden nobody puts actual butter on bread, we have loads of different butter-based "spreads" for that. Bregott (literally "spread good/well/tasty") is probably the most common and engineered to be spreadable straight from the fridge.
Proper butter is for cooking but primarily for baking.
I am 45, have been interested in cooking for 20+ years, read many cookbooks and so on. I learned about butter dishes and the idea of having butter out on the counter to make it spreadable from the internet. I dare say that practice does not happen here.
It does happen; I've met a few older Swedes that used actual butter, but nowadays most people seem to be eating Lätta or Bregott. The situation's the same here in Finland -- butter on bread is mostly an old people thing and most people just buy the local equivalent of Bregott.
In Denmark most of the butter is salted and the Danish are definitely a butter nation. I'm wondering how nobody tried to introduce some of this "japanese butter tools" to Denmark. There might be a business case here.
Kerrygold in Germany is sold in the standard gold wrapper but unsalted. I was really surprised having come from the UK where it's salted and utterly delicious. If you want the salted stuff you have to hunt for silver labels, and I have only started to find these recently and only then in the biggest supermarkets.
In the US, salted butter and unsalted butter are both sold in stores. In general, you eat the salted butter directly, and you might use either salted or unsalted butter in cooking.
The only reason we use unsalted butter is if a recipe specifically calls for it. But it's widely available.
I've heard that unsalted butter makes it easier to measure the salt to put in a recipe, since you don't need to reverse engineer the salt content of the butter. But in practice I don't find this very compelling because (in my experience) the salt is pretty standardized. I generally convert my own recipes back to using purely salted butter so I don't have to stock two kinds of butter.
I almost always cook with unsalted butter (unless all I have is salted, or it's a recipe I'm familiar with and comfortable with salted butter in) because it provides more freedom to control salt-fat combinations, and salt levels are one of the things I am most likely to find wrong (in either direction) with unfamiliar recipes.
I occasionally also use sold-as-unsalted butter in directly-served applications, because it lets you play with different finishing salts instead of just getting it mixed in with the butter.
Wait. What? The first time I learned that there is salted butter was in scandinavia, and now you are telling me you dont do that anymore? Admittedly it was a long time ago in what feels far away..
Salted butter is more common in Western France and Brittany in particular. Brittany has been a large salt producer for centuries and as such used to be exempt from the salt tax (gabelle).
I'm almost certain that salt was never added to butter as a preservative and your "cleaner" method theory is unsound: there is nothing about churning that would accidentally introduce salt. Salted butter is probably best thought of as a subset of compound butters.
Salted butter was a popular spread in restaurants and consumers wanted it in their homes.
