Martha Stewart’s 3 Favorite Butters for Baking, Tested by a Food Editor (with Cookies!)

Martha Stewart claims to bake with Kerrygold and Vermont Creamery butters, a fun fact she shared with Food & Wine back in 2021. (She also revealed that she bakes with unsalted butter, so she can add the salt herself and have more control over the overall flavor.) She’s also a big fan of Plugrà butter, which she used to bake a whopping 35 Thanksgiving pies last year, according to a 2024 Instagram post.

Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter is an Irish, European-style, uncultured butter made with milk from grass-fed cows. It’s famous for its golden color and rich flavor, which makes it perfect for caramelizing and browning for all sorts of baked goods and sweet treats. Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter is another European-style butter that’s, well, cultured. That means live bacterial cultures are added to the cream to ferment before the butter is churned, resulting in an intensely rich, slightly tangy flavor. Plugrà Premium European-Style Butter is adored for its high fat content of 82 percent, as are the Kerrygold and Vermont Creamery butters. (FYI, most butter made in the U.S. clocks in at around 70 percent, says The Kitchn, while the butterfat requirement for European butter is 82 percent, according to AllRecipes. This is why Euro picks have a more prominent taste and creaminess.) It’s also small-batch made and slow-churned for an extra luscious, smooth consistency.

A Food Editor’s Test of Martha Stewart’s Favorite Butters

I prepared four batches of former PureWow senior food editor Katherine Gillen’s lemon curd thumbprint cookies, three made with each of Martha’s favorite butters and one made with generic unsalted butter to have a control. (I also substituted raspberry jam for lemon curd since that’s what I had on hand.) I then tasted and compared them to see which butter made the tastiest cookie. I also tasted each butter by itself before tasting the cookies.

Right off the bat, the generic was less complex in flavor and very light in color compared to the others, and it made a more fragile dough that cracked at the edges when depressed in the center. Its flavor was still super buttery, like a cross between a sugar cookie and shortbread. But were the fancy butters better? Here’s my breakdown of Martha’s top three:

• The Kerrygold option was rich, slightly earthy and borderline refreshing on its own. Its flavor and smell reminded me of popcorn butter. It made a yellower, looser dough with more stickiness than the Vermont Creamery alternative. In terms of taste, these cookies were somehow saltier than the others and had a very rich, buttery backbone.
• Vermont Creamery’s butter was creamy, grassy and clean tasting. Its cultured nature makes it great for butter-heavy breads and baked goods, like pie crust, scones, biscuits and shortbread. In these cookies, the butter’s flavor was bright and undeniably indulgent. It tasted like it had an almost acidic tang or edge to it and the texture was crumbly yet super moist.
• As for Plugrà, it was slick, luscious and pastoral. It made a slightly firmer dough than the Kerrygold and smelled butteriest of them all. In terms of taste, the cookies were the funkiest of the lot, with a distinct grassiness that added much nuance to the sweet-tart raspberry filling.

The TLDR? My favorite was the Plugrà cookie, but I also really enjoyed the super-tender texture of the Kerrygold cookies. All four versions were perfectly scrumptious (butter is butter, after all), although side-by-side, I could definitely taste the difference. In case you want to try them for yourself…