The TikTok Butter Hack That Solves Toast Issues
Buttered toast is a food item that has served people well for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and even snacks for decades. From fancy brunches to broke college kid meals, it's an essential dish because it's fast and easy to make, it's cheap, and it hits the spot when you want something filling and delicious, or if you just need something to keep you feeling full until your next meal. It even helps with a stomach ache. So, with how popular it is, why is buttering toast still a hard task?
When warm bread meets cold butter, the expectation is that the bread will melt the butter, but that doesn't always happen as fast as you may need it to, and then you end up with torn bread or a pat of butter right in the center of toast that hasn't been spread out evenly. This can lead to less-than-ideal toast and a waste of bread and butter. Luckily, a recent TikTok "hack" has people reaching for an unexpected kitchen utensil to solve their buttered toast woes.
Getting the perfect buttered toast
One of the most common culprits behind difficult-to-spread butter is your refrigerator. If you took the butter out of the refrigerator only seconds or minutes before attempting to spread it on the toast, it's unlikely to be very cooperative.
For many people, the obvious solution is to use a butter dish and leave a stick of the substance in the dish on your counter, ensuring that you always have room-temperature butter, which spreads better, at the ready. If you don't have a butter dish, or if you forgot to refill it (oops!) and you need a solution for how to butter toast now, you can try using one utensil that you most likely have laying around your kitchen — a vegetable peeler.
According to a TikTok video, posted by user laurentokk, you can get thin strips of butter when you use a vegetable peeler on your butter. These will soften faster than a pat of butter when you place it on warm toast. If that sounds too good to be true, it's not! This is one kitchen hack that actually does work.
Other uses for shaved butter
According to the video, all you have to do is remove the butter from the fridge, run the peeler across the top of it, and then put the slices on the hot toast. After just a few seconds, the butter will melt, and you can use a knife to spread it without tearing your toast. You can even store the shaved pieces in a container in the refrigerator to use when you don't have a lot of time to shave a stick of butter.
Don't like toast? That's okay, and this butter trick can be used for a variety of dishes, like placing thin layers of butter on Ritz crackers for a snack, adding light butter to hot popcorn, or melting butter on top of roasted vegetables. This trick also works well for blocks of cheese, according to Chatelaine, because it can create perfect slices of cheese that melt easily on top of potatoes or can be placed neatly on top of crackers.