TEOTWAWKI Butter Options

Well over a decade ago, when I woke up and realized that storing food was not just something we did in case of job loss or natural disaster, but that with the way things were going in the country, we were really going to have to live off it, I got to thinking about butter.
Going without.  Truth be told, I really like butter.  And if I was being really honest with myself, I had to admit I didn't want to live in a world without butter.  No butter meant no buttering toast or popcorn, no baking respectable chocolate chip cookies.  Life wouldn't be worth living.  While going without butter is an option for some, I don't like it. 

Dairy cow.  We weren't in a position to get a dairy cow.  We still aren't, so that option for a butter supply is eliminated.

Freezing.  This was the first somewhat reasonable (for us) option that we used for our butter needs.  We were going through a couple of pounds of butter per week at the time as a homeschooling family with four children at home and lots of homemade bread and cookies.  We'd buy it for a dollar a pound (those were the days!) and store it in freezer bags in the freezer.  At those prices, we kept an average of eighty to one hundred pounds of butter on hand.

Home canning.  But I didn't like being reliant on electricity for my butter, even though it would last a few months at cool temperatures if the power did go out and stay out.  Lots of friendly folks on the internet claimed that canning butter was safe, their grandmothers did it all the time, the USDA and Cooperative Extension people were uninformed, ... yada, yada, yada.   Being of a somewhat rebellious nature back in 2008, I also canned a lot of butter.  This was not good.  While we ate it and I baked with it and none of us got sick, home canning of butter is not safe, regardless of the method used.  Butter is sixteen percent water, plenty enough for botulism spores to live and produce toxins.  And kill.

Clarified butter or ghee is real butter and shelf-stable.  And at that time it had a reputation for being ridiculously expensive.  I didn't feel it was even an option for our family, so I didn't do the math.  After doing the math now for all the options, I perhaps should have taken a closer look. Currently, there is a wide variety of options on Amazon, and about the best you're going to do is $12.00 per pound.  It's probably cheaper in grocery stores.

Red Feather butter is real commercially-canned butter from New Zealand.  Single cans run about $16 for 12 ounces on Amazon, or $69 for twelve 12-ounce cans.  They reportedly have a five-year shelf-life.  I bought two cases back in 2008 and didn't open any to taste test until last year.  Unfortunately, the butter in my twelve-year-old cans has a very off-flavor to it, kinda moldy, like blue cheese.  I decided to give it a try in making chocolate chip cookies.  I figured the sugar and chocolate would be enough to mask the off-flavor.  I sampled the cookie dough.  No go.  It was really bad.  But with nothing to lose now, I plowed ahead with baking the cookies.  The baked cookies tasted just fine, so that's what will happen with the very expensive Red Feather butter.

Dehydrated butter powder, sold by companies like Emergency Essentials, Augason Farms, and Thrive, was another option I explored at that time.  In baked goods like muffins, butter powder doesn't quite work as a substitute for butter unless there is another fat also in the recipe.  Lacking oil, the result will be somewhat dense.  Simple side-by-side comparison of price and servings does not work here, so I compiled all the information in the chart below.

	Price	Serving size	Servings per container	Calories per serving	Calories per container	Equivalent pounds of fresh butter	Price per pound
Red Feather (12, 12-oz cans)	$69	1 tablespoon	288	100	28800	9	$7.66
Emergency Essentials (#10 can)	$29.95	2 tablespoons	74	90	6600	2.06	14.05
Augason Farms (#10 can)	$34.95	1 tablespoon	204	35	7140	2.23	15.67
Thrive (#10 can)	$19.79	1 teaspoon	531	15	7965	2.48	7.98
Butter	$2.99	1 tablespoon	32	100	3200	1	2.99

  

This whole exercise in calculating cost per pound, rather than per serving which varies by manufacturer, revealed a very different picture than what I'd anticipated.  I'd always believed that Red Feather was the most expensive of the common prepping options.  That's clearly not the case.  I'd assumed that clarified butter was so expensive as to not be worth considering.  And yet, it's about the same price as the #10 cans from Emergency Essential and Augason Farms.  Yes, both of these companies offer sales at times, so that will bring the cost down.  But it's also rather disappointing to see that those #10 cans hold less than three pounds of butter.  People buy them, thinking they're getting a lot of food.  A lot of folks are going to have a rude awakening when they start using some of these foods. (I apologize for the prices of the various options not reflecting today's reality.  Even if I updated them, they probably won't reflect reality in the next week or so, either.  You'll have to plug in the prices you find and then do the math yourself.  Fortunately, the number of servings per can hasn't changed, so you'll be good there.  Assuming you can find the product for sale.)

The most versatile, best-tasting, and most cost-effective option for replacing butter in a long-term grid-down scenario is coconut oil.  

Coconut oil, as I've written about previously, is my go-to butter substitute.  But it's not even that much of a substitute anymore.  I use it in numerous ways every day, in making just-add-water baking mixes, Magic Mix, regular baking, sauteing, popping popcorn, etc.  There are a number of factors that will affect the cost--glass or plastic jars, virgin or refined oil, organic or not, bulk or small size.  The best price on Amazon right now is about three dollars per pound.  My local dollar store has 7.5 ounce bottles for a dollar, or about two dollars per pound.  Grocery Outlet prices will often get down to about $2.50 per pound.  Coconut oil stored in glass jars and kept cool and dark has a shelf life of at least five years.

Links to related posts:
Coconut oil
Substituting coconut oil for butter in Magic Mix
Canning butter

For further reading:
https://www.augasonfarms.com/butter-powder-10-can?q=butter
https://www.thrivelife.com/butter-powder-4206.html
https://www.beprepared.com/butter-powder-large-can?q=butter

4.21.23