The Grass-Fed Costco Butter That's Sending Shockwaves Through TikTok
This year, TikTok has taken it upon itself to make up for all the bad things anyone has ever said about butter. Most notably, the platform gave rise to the still-raging butter board craze that makes a fancy charcuterie plate look like last year's designer shoes. Set forth by Brooklyn-based recipe developer Justine Doiron, whose viral TikTok video cites inspiration from a recipe featured in Joshua McFadden's cookbook "Six Seasons: a New Way With Vegetables," the trend involves smearing butter onto a clean surface and anointing it with all manner of edible bric-a-brac.
If you're taking the effort to procure wild honey, flaky sea salt, and micro greens for your next buttery bacchanal, you might as well ensure that the base of your board is coming from happy cows. According to a review from TikTok user @_butter_dawg_, you needn't go further than your nearest Costco for a high-quality brick of reasonably priced grass-fed butter.
The New Zealand export gets a 9/10
"We've just made a massive Costco discovery," says the TikToker, cutting right to the chase in the butter aisle of the wholesale retailer. He is shown, in a move that might shock the butter plebeians among us, unwrapping the green package and taking a large bite out of the soft yellow brick, as if he were biting into a block of cheddar cheese. "Oh that's good. That is good," he says of the salted, 95% grass-fed New Zealand product. He gives it a "9 out of 10." Costco Guide slid into the comments to proclaim that they "love it."
According to the Costco Food Database, a new tool that provides nutrition information and reviews for just about every product in the store, the butter in question comes from Costco's own brand, Kirkland Signature. The two-pound package clocks in at $9.99, which is well under the price of a Kerrygold package of the same size. And according to a Costco Food Database commenter, the Costco brand is "even better" than Kerrygold.
What does grass-fed mean, anyway?
When a package of butter has a "grass-fed" label, it simply means the cows from whence it came were raised on a diet of grassland roughage in the warmer months. In addition to the moral perk of knowing the cow responsible for your butter board spent most of its days chilling in a scenic pasture, grass-fed butter may also contain more nutrients than standard butter. "The cow's healthier, grass-centric diet is more natural and vitamin-rich than grain feed," writes Foodsmiths. The outlet adds that grass-fed butter is also high in butyric acid, which has been known to "[induce] clinical improvement and remission" in people with Crohn's disease as its good for the colon.
According to a clinical trial in the Journal of Dairy Science, grass-fed butter also contains five times more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) than butter from grain-fed cows. Like butyric acid, CLA has anti-inflammatory properties. While Costco's Kirkland Signature Grass Fed butter is 95% grass-fed, significantly more than your average block of butter, butter from 100% grass-fed cows will bare a "grass-finished" label.