Cooking is a great skill and talent that a lot of people have. Chefs routinely create beautiful and delicious dishes for people to enjoy that bring happiness to the palete. However, a lot of us are unfortunately less gifted and rely on more simple meals to get by, like toast and cereal for breakfast or boxed pasta for dinner. One staple that everyone uses in these basic dishes is butter. Butter is great in a lot of meals and is very versatile, but it loses a lot of value when used on its own. The term overrated should be applied to plain butter because it has a very strange texture and doesn’t add any flavor to dishes.
Butter is an overrated condiment because it is not texturally satisfying to eat. To be clear, when butter is added to a cooked dish, it’s pretty great, but when butter is put on things like plain toast or bagels, it is very underwhelming. When you spread plain butter on pieces of bread, the main purpose is to reduce the dryness of it, as toast and bagels and such normally lack a lot of moisture. However, doing this knocks the texture of your food down a lot of pegs.
Bread on its own, especially after being toasted, has a great crunch with a slightly chewy, soft inside, which makes it very fun to eat. However, when you add butter to the mix, it makes the bread slightly soggy and slimy, which is very unappetizing. I don’t know about most people, but personally I don’t want to sacrifce the great tacticle feel of bread for a slightly wetter, gooey alternative. On top of that, if your bread is not warmed up at all, the butter will not melt, leaving you with a very uneven layer of solid dairy that won’t absorb into the bread. This completely ruins the whole point of butter, which is to moisturize your bread. If the butter doesn’t absorb, all you are left with is dry bread with a thick goop on top. It’s like using lotion but not rubbing it in. It completely negates the whole point of using it in the first place. And if your butter does melt, your simple meal becomes incredibly messy. The butter likes to drip down the sides if you’re not careful, and when butter gets on hands, it is very hard to wash off. The textural nightmare of butter makes it incredibly overrated, and on top of that, it doesn’t even taste good.
Butter is overrated because its taste does not justify the drawbacks when it comes to texture. Butter doesn’t taste bad, per se, but it tastes like nothing. Adding it to bread does literally nothing to enhance the flavor of your meal, and the slight dairy tinge you get from it takes away from the taste of the bread. I am a person who loves the flavor of bread: I eat plain toast or a plain bagel at least twice a week.
However, even I would balk at having to eat bread every day. After a while, the taste of bread gets very repetitive and boring, which is why there are much better alternatives to butter that accomplish the goal of reducing the dryness of bread while also bringing more flavor and fun to your meal. If you use butter on your toast every day, your meals will quickly become boring and even something dreaded. However, there are other options like jam that are all around superior to butter. Jam is a great choice because not only does it help add moisture to bread, but it also has a great flavor. No matter what your favorite fruit is, there is a jam version of it out there, so not only do you get to enjoy some great bread, but you also get an amazing fruity flavor as well. In addition, if you get bored of one flavor, there are hundreds of other options to try. This will make your breakfast so much more fun than using plain butter every day. At the very least, you could try flavored butters, which will bring a bit of fun to your breakfast, but this option still has the textural issues of butter that can be solved by jams or jellies.
Butter is a staple addition to thousands of dishes, in which it thrives, but it should not be considered as a good option for more basic meals. Not only does it have a very strange, unpleasant texture and often fail to help alleviate the dryness of bread, but it doesn’t even bring any extra flavor to the table. Overall, there are so many better tasting and more effective options that are not being utilized to their full potential because people have an unrealistic view of butter and stick to their norm, even if that norm is incredibly overrated and boring.
