How Long Can You Freeze Butter Before It Goes Bad?'

When butter is front and center, everything tastes better, so it makes sense to keep it on hand in your refrigerator. While store-bought butter has a pretty decent shelf-life in the fridge, up to three months, if you find that you aren't using each stick before it starts to go bad, you might be eyeing your freezer speculatively. Yes, as it happens, you can freeze butter, but you won't want to keep it in there indefinitely. Butter will last up to about a year in the freezer before it starts to go bad.

And actually, butter doesn't "go bad" in the freezer the way it might spoil in the fridge. You could technically keep your butter in the freezer forever, and it would remain safe to eat. However, after about a year, the quality of the butter can begin to degrade, with noticeable differences in texture and taste. It can even begin to take on some of the flavors of the food around it.

It's worth noting that while you can also freeze stick margarine, margarine or butter substitutes that come in a tub aren't the best candidates for stashing in your freezer (though you still can if you remove them from their original container). Just be aware that, because of their differing ingredients, the shelf-life will be of a shorter duration than real butter, and the quality might not be so great after thawing.

The nice thing about freezer butter is that it barely requires prep; if your sticks are still in the unopened box in which they were purchased from the store, you can slip that into a freezer-safe plastic bag and call it good. If you're just freezing individual sticks, it's best to wrap them in either aluminum foil or plastic to help keep the freezer's frigid air from directly touching the butter (thus causing freezer burn), then place in an airtight container, whether that's glass and lidded or just a freezer-safe plastic bag.

If you don't use butter by the stick all at once (you just need a tablespoon or two for an unbroken pan sauce), you can also freeze conveniently portioned individual pats. Just be sure to wrap each of them tightly in plastic before stashing them together in a freezer-safe container or plastic bag.

And another thing — you'll want to write the date on your container or bag so that you know how long you have left until whatever's leftover should maybe be thrown away. Time can get away from the best of us, and if you find a bag with a few sticks of butter in the back of the freezer some indeterminate number of months later, it can be helpful to know that it's still usable.

Thawing butter can take up to four hours on the counter and even longer in the refrigerator — overnight — which is the better option if you don't need to use it same-day. If you don't have a few hours and need it sooner, you can actually make flakes with a box grater, using the largest holes; those smaller pieces will thaw a lot faster than leaving it whole, and they can even be mixed right into your recipe if it calls for cold butter.

If you're just melting your butter in a pan before throwing in aromatics like onion or garlic, you don't have to worry about thawing it — carefully cut off however much you'll need and put it right into your pan over the heat (this is an instance where freezing individual pats can come in handy, too). If you're using a recipe that calls for melted butter, you don't have to thaw it then, either; place it in a microwave-safe dish and pop it directly in the microwave.