Quick answer: Yes — butter freezes beautifully, with little or no change to its taste or texture. Keep it in its original wrapper inside an airtight freezer bag, and freeze salted butter for up to around nine months and unsalted for up to about five for the best quality. Frozen at −18°C it stays safe well beyond that; only the flavour slowly fades. Defrost it overnight in the fridge, or grate it straight from frozen into pastry.
Of all the things worth tucking into the freezer, butter is perhaps the most quietly useful — and the most forgiving. Unlike cream or soft cheese, it carries so little water and so much fat that the freeze-and-thaw that ruins more delicate dairy barely touches it. A multipack bought on offer, or the extra blocks that appear at Christmas, will keep for months and emerge tasting just as they went in. Here is how to do it properly, and how long it really keeps.
Does butter actually freeze well?
Remarkably well. Freezing damages food by turning the water inside it into ice crystals that rupture the structure; butter is roughly four-fifths fat and only a little water, so there is very little to spoil. Salted butter keeps best of all, because salt is a natural preservative that slows the slow oxidation which eventually turns any fat stale. The one thing butter does do in the freezer is behave like a sponge for smells — fat readily takes on the aroma of a strong-smelling freezer — which is why wrapping it well matters more than you might expect.
How to freeze butter
The method is simple, and the wrapping is the whole game.
- Keep it in its wrapper. The foil or greaseproof it came in is the first line of defence and carries the use-by date.
- Overwrap and seal. Slip the wrapped block into a freezer bag or airtight container to shut out air and stray freezer odours, and press out the air.
- Portion if it helps. Cut into halves or into tablespoon-sized pieces if you tend to bake in set amounts, so you thaw only what you need.
- Label and date. Note whether it is salted or unsalted and the date it went in.
- Freeze before the use-by date — and never freeze butter that has been left out for a long time or smells at all rancid. Freezing preserves butter; it cannot rescue it.
How long can you freeze butter?
For the best flavour, use salted butter within about nine months and unsalted within about five — the salt is what buys the extra time. The Food Standards Agency describes a freezer as a “pause button”: kept properly frozen at around −18°C, butter remains safe to eat beyond those windows, but the taste gradually dulls and it can pick up freezer odours, so sooner is always better.
How to defrost and use frozen butter
Defrost butter overnight in the fridge rather than on the worktop, so it never sits warm for long. For baking you often need not defrost it at all: a block of frozen butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater is the pastry-maker’s trick for rubbing evenly into flour, and it drops straight into a saucepan to melt. If you want it spreadable, let a portion come up to cool room temperature for an hour or so rather than microwaving it, which tends to melt the edges before the middle softens. Once thawed, keep butter in the fridge and don’t refreeze it — each cycle dulls the flavour a little further.
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- All our family recipes
Sources & further reading
- Food Standards Agency — How to chill, freeze and defrost food safely.
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