Ina Garten's Favorite Butter For Bread Is French And Flavorful

It comes as little surprise that food maven Ina Garten enjoys simple yet luxurious ingredients, and the butter for her bread is no exception. For cooking, Garten has specified that Cabot brand unsalted butter is her go-to, and it's one of the fridge essentials she always keeps on hand. When it comes to her breakfast toast, however, there is only one butter that makes the cut: Beurre de Baratte, a French butter with flaked sea salt that has a distinctively nutty, tangy taste.

This bougie ingredient Garten tops her toast with originates in Normandy, France, and uses milk from grass-grazed cows. It's mixed in a traditional wooden butter churn for processing and molded by hand into its final round shape. The price of the delicacy reflects its painstaking manufacturing, retailing for as much as $35 per pound or more online. 

Garten shared her love for this special butter with "Seinfeld" star Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the latter's "Wiser Than Me" podcast. The Barefoot Contessa said that coffee and toast spread with decadent Beurre de Baratte is actually her go-to breakfast. Garten follows up her coffee and upscale buttered toast with a cup of tea later in the morning and soup for lunch, and usually dines out or orders in for dinner.

There may be a few reasons why Ina Garten doesn't use Beurre de Baratte in her recipes. She strongly recommends cooking and baking with unsalted butter, so you can regulate the amount of salt that ends up in the final dish. Plus, the sodium content of pre-salted butter can differ widely from brand to brand. The presence of the flaked sea salt in Beurre de Baratte, therefore, makes it better for finishing dishes. The product's high price tag is definitely another reason why it might be best reserved for spreading and garnishing, rather than using it by the pound in baked goods.

Garten's love for butter extends to all sorts of other varieties, too. White truffle butter is another staple she favors, using it in dishes like tagliarelle with truffle butter and her truffled mac and cheese. Her preferred brand is Urbani, which she mentions by name in her recipes that call for white truffle butter. She confesses to ordering as many as six packages at a time, and stores them in her freezer.

Alongside the Cabot unsalted butter, Beurre de Baratte, and Urbani, Garten also keeps flavorful herbed butter stocked in her fridge. She mixes these up herself using unsalted butter — we can safely assume it's the Cabot she reaches for — and a handful of herbs and other mix-ins. She's also a fan of incorporating brown butter into dishes for a nutty boost of flavor, especially in homemade cornbread.