Don't buy salted butter?

I'd never given much thought to salted vs. unsalted butter. My tastebuds have always preferred salted, so that's what I've always bought.

However, two people (who I deeply respect) have told me in the last month, that buying salted butter is less frugal than unsalted. The reason is that when you buy butter, you buy by the pound. If you buy salted butter, you're paying for some butter and some salt. Not 100% butter. And you can always salt the butter as you use it later.

Makes sense to me, but I found it quite curious that two different people, without being asked, have mentioned it to me.

So I'm interested in what y'all's preference is: salted vs. unsalted?

I'm not sure about frugality, but according tot he Weston A. Price Foundation, because salt acts as a preservative, the unsalted butter is more likely to be fresh and better for you.  Ideally, I prefer to churn my own butter - you cannot beat it!  But, when I buy it, I buy unsalted now.  Unsalted actually tastes better, with a sprinkle of salt, than pre-salted!

I do salted.

The Land O'Lakes people know *exactly* how much salt to add to their product.  Perfect flavor, not too salty.

When I use unsalted butter and add salt, I add too much.

Salted butter is so much simpler for me.  One less ingredient for me to screw up.

I would say the opposite in regards to frugality, things that last longer are more frugal. I never buy unsalted butter. Salted butter is never so salty that I wouldn't salt the product regardless, the only exception would be a laminated dough, like croissant dough or puff pastry that calls for a huge amount of butter. Therefore I buy less salt by buying salted butter.

I also buy salted.  Usually in November and December, I find good sales on butter and buy a bunch for the freezer.  I find it lasts better when I get the salted butter.  

My wife and I have been buying unsalted butter for several years now, I also buy other low sodium products. If I want food salty I will salt it myself, simple as that. No frugality intended!

Personally I do mostly salted with some unsalted as well.  Get it on the fall specials and freeze.  I know I need about 30 lbs a year.   My thinking is that salted butter is more likely to safely survive if I have a freezer outage and I prefer it for most things.  And the amount of salt in the butter is small so I am not losing much butter.

The only place that I use any quantity of unsalted is making ghee.  And if I want the milk solids to be usable as the left overs from the process I need unsalted as the salt all ends up in the milk solids rendering them almost inedible from the concentrated salt.

Now I do find the comments  above on Land o Lakes butter and frugality interesting.  I changed from the store brand to it a few years ago and rapidly changed back.  The reason was that in melted form it had almost twice as much water as the store brand.   Figured that I wanted all the value I could get plus I didn't like how it made the bread a bit soggy making garlic bread or toast.  On the other side of the coin I like how smoothly it spread with limited tearing of the bread.  Have also since found that it seems to make popcorn soggy a bit compared to the store brand.

According to this link, the amount of salt in salted butter amounts to less than two percent by weight. At my local mega-low-mart right now, butter is right about three dollars a pound, which means that you would get an extra six cents worth of butter by following this frugality tip.  That's not enough for me to overwhelm my preference for salted butter.

However, that same link says that salted butter tends to contain more water than unsalted butter, giving a range of water percentages that varies by eight percent from the low end to the high end.  If that's true, and we measure the wateriest salted butter, that means we're gaining two percent more butter by leaving out the salt and another eight percent (maximum) by getting less watery butter.  That's ten percent total -- so you get an extra thirty cents, more or less, worth of butter by going with unsalted, in the best case.  I can see the frugality argument for that.  However, I do think I would tend to oversalt things made with unsalted butter, so the value proposition is threatened by a hard-to-quantify loss of utility with the unsalted butter.

This is all theoretical for me because these days I eat a mostly plant-foods diet, and I do not actually buy any butter at all.  On rare occasions when willpower fails I use a teaspoonful or two of butter purchased by others in my household, for it is mightily yummy.

According to the Weston A. Price Foundation, because salt acts as a preservative, the unsalted butter is more likely to be fresh and better for you.

This would not be the first time that I find myself in disagreement with the Weston A. Price Foundation -- see, e.g., my choice of a plant-based diet.  But their logic here strikes me as precisely backwards.  Buying unsalted butter doesn't get you fresher butter, it gets you butter just as old as the salted butter next to it in the diary case, which could be expected to be less well preserved due to the lack of salt as a preservative ingredient.  

It makes no sense whatsoever that unsalted would be fresher, infact since it's less bought I would expect it to be older. It's a moot point here though as I have never seen unsalted butter for sale.
I don't think it would be a saving in money either, by the time you have brought the butter up to room temp, put it in a bowl and mixed the salt in, then washed the bowl and spoon and cooled the butter back down you have almost certainly used that 2% saving in hot water, soap, electric and lost butter.
It really really confuses me when a recipe says you MUST USE unsalted butter and then calls for salt. just add a tiny bit less salt to start with.

Salted butter was never popular here in Germany. You get two different butters, those made from sweet cream and cultured sour cream. The organic butter is always spreadable in my experience.

So for me it is a cultural question. You can only get salted butter (from France, I think) in some specialties stores.
I bake a lot and having salted butter would throw my recipes off. The traditional German recipes for cookies and cakes do not consider "add a pinch of salt" either, only sugar. This is changing due to the international brands of cookies which always contain salt as well, but overall I guess the preference for unsalted butter is deeply ingrained in the local cooking and eating culture.

I buy both. Salted butter goes on things, unsalted butter goes in things. Using salted butter in a recipe will throw off the proportions, unless the recipe specifies. Granted, depending on what the recipe is, it might not be noticeable. But then again, it might be very very noticeable!

But salted butter definitely tastes better on toast or cooked vegetables.

Up until I married my baker of a wife, I never purchased unsalted butter. She believes that the butter used in baking should always be unsalted so that the salt amount can be more carefully calculated as it greatly impacts baked goods. Also she is first generation in the US with Polish and Hungarian parents, who never used salted butter, but would salt their foods as needed, so it was not a staple in her home growing up. I have adopted the additional butter (unsalted) but we always have salted in the butter dish for bread. This traces back to my childhood when someone (who?!?) had replaced the butter in the butter dish with unsalted butter (which no one seemed to know where it came from). During dinner that evening my mother had smeared some butter on a piece of bread and taken a bite to discover it was unsalted. Through hilarious rounds of accusation about where the butter came from and who put it there, "who put the butter on the plate?" became a household phrase when you couldn't pinpoint who had been the culprit for various things around the house (peed on the seat, ate the last cookie, used the last of the tp, etc).

I also buy salted and unsalted butter, but for the vast majority of things use salted (and I do think it keeps better, which is important considering how expensive butter has gotten here lately). I don't see salt being a big savings point for me. And if I'm baking or cooking, I adjust the salt in the recipe as needed. It's helpful, as sometimes only salted (or unsalted) is on sale and I'm stuck with just one or the other, and I need to know how to use both.

I buy unsalted so I can manage my salt. The pennies you'd save on unsalted butter are meaningless IMO. But not even for health reasons, I want to manage how salty my food tastes and make high-salt concessions in moderation. I don't want a slice of bread with a little butter to suddenly taste saltier, so I have to salt my eggs more so they taste salty in proportion. If I make more and more concessions on salt than just butter, suddenly I'm sitting down like my dad salting my fast food because he can't taste it. And then you have health issues. Better to nip it in the bud. If I need my butter to last longer, I freeze it. The rest of the time it's kept in the fridge. Simple.

Growing up we always had salted butter, and to be frugal it was bought on sale and frozen, then kept a pound at a time in the fridge, and a stick or two at room temperature in the butter dish in a cabinet or on the table.
Unsalted butter will spoil quickly at room temperature, and cold butter will ruin your toast. Soft butter is so nice.
Mom always adjusted/left out salt when baking, and might get some unsalted butter if there was a lot to bake.

One of the things that stood out to me on a trip to France, was how good the butter was. I didn't even have this stuff... but here's a great video about a French butter maker.

Hi,  I use salted most of the time. When making candy unsalted butter acts differently.  

Something to consider.  My chiropractor once told me that butter from corn fed cows causes an inflammatory reaction within the body.   When I switched to grass fed cow butter my joint pain subsided so much that they almost stopped hurting , Which means I don't need pain relievers anymore.