Is Shelf-Stable Butter Powder any Good for Emergency Preparedness?

Today we're testing out Augustin Farms butter powder

I'm hopeful, maybe optimistic, but we'll see. What's up, my friends? Growing up, there were times when we didn't have milk

but what we did have was milk powder, and my mom would mix it with water and put it in a pitcher in the fridge

and be like, it's the same thing. We all knew it was not the same thing. It did not taste the same, not by a long shot

But powdered milk has really good uses, and obviously can be used

to replace milk in any sort of emergency situation. Food storage, obviously we don't have the

capability to store enough milk for a long-term emergency or issue. So, having those other

alternatives is definitely helpful. Butter is another one of those where I'm like, I'm a bit

skeptical. I'm optimistic, but I'm skeptical. My wife and I took a look at this. She saw it in

the store the other day and she was like, that seems really cool

Because as we think about food storage, we're like, okay, cool, we can do a lot of the staples and stuff, but I need butter for baking. I need butter for a lot of different things. And so what are we going to do if there's a situation and we need butter? Other than, you know, having a milk cow or something and literally making our own, which is one of the options, absolutely. Or bartering with other people for it or whatever, right? We all have skills we can trade if something like that happens. It's the value in community. But I'm digressing already

So let's get into the butter. The first thing we decided to look at was how pricing wise this compares to real butter

A lot of times, you know, food storage food ends up costing more than kind of the

counterpart, the real deal, right? So we decided to look it up. We looked at current pricing

This is as of this week or last week when we looked at this

But a land of lakes, a stick of butter costs a dollar and 32 cents

Great value. Walmart butter was still 92 cents a stick for butter. This comes out to line up with

being only 78.4 cents per stick of butter. This is actually quite a bit cheaper

than a real butter and we're like okay so if it's even close this could actually

be like a normal staple that we have in our home and so that meant it was time to

actually test it. So I bought one of these and we took it home and we opened it up

Now turning this into normal butter for use like spreading it on toast or whatever is pretty straightforward You take for every half a cup of butter powder you mix in one and a half tablespoons of water and you stir it up

And at first, it kind of is really crumbly, but the more you stir it and it work in that water

it pretty quickly turns into this kind of creamy type butter. In fact, they say right on it that you can like shape it into a stick

if you want to to make it look more like butter, which I think is actually kind of funny

Like the shape of it doesn't matter that much to me. I'll leave it a little bowl. I digress once again. Sorry about that. I mixed it up and immediately I made a piece of toast

And I spread the butter on a piece of toast. And I ate said piece of toast. And I noticed right

away that it was butter like, but it wasn't actual butter. So I got thinking, okay, if this doesn't

taste like butter and doesn't behave like butter, what's it made from? So I looked at the

ingredients on the package and it says the ingredients. Butter powder is made from butter

which it says is made up of cream, water, and salt. Totally, absolutely true

They also add non-fat milk, so presumably milk powder, since it's powder

It's also made from, it has vitamin E and vitamin C that they add

It says to protect the flavor. That's it. So there's not a whole bunch of other stuff in here

It's like actually real butter, but in a powder form. But when I spread it on the toast, a couple things I noticed

One, the flavor just, it was off, right? It was not the same as delicious, fresh

butter. It was okay, but it was definitely not the same. The other thing I noticed though is like

it doesn't melt in like at all. But then I thought, okay, so maybe for spreading on toast it's not

ideal. We're not going to replace our normal butter with this stuff. Okay. But yeah, an emergency

situation, it's better than having no flavor on my toast or, you know, using up all of our jam

So I decided that I would try using it in baking. So next I baked a batch of our favorite chocolate

chip cookies. We have these too often. Okay. So we know. know exactly how they come out, right? We know exactly what they're supposed to taste like

We know exactly how they're supposed to feel. These came out similar, okay? But they didn't come

out with the same kind of gooiness. They came out feeling a little bit, a little bit more dry

but still very soft. So the actual kind of cookie consistency was definitely different than what we

were used to. The other thing I noticed was that the flavor was just not quite what I was used

to, I did notice that once they cooled down, that some of that kind of oddness that I noticed

when I ate the toast the oddness in the flavor a lot of that went away So once the cookies were kind of down to room temperature they tasted more like what I was used to just again with a little bit drier but still very soft consistency to them

So when it came to baking, I actually think that this performed really well

It's not the same, but it performed really well. So then I thought, I wonder what it would taste like if the flavors were mixed

It even has a recipe right on the side of it to make honey butter from this as well as their honey powder

They make a honey powder too. I can see reasons why you'd want honey powder, but I'd rather just have real honey because it doesn't go bad

I get, though, it'll take it more space, weighs more. So powder has its uses, but I'd just rather have honey

Anyway, I mixed honey with this stuff the exact same way that I would make honey butter

And I decided to try that. And it kind of ruined honey butter a little bit. And that's just because there's that kind of oddness to the flavor

I don't know if it's from the vitamin E and C that they add or the powdered milk or whatever that they added to it

But there's just some aspect to it that doesn't taste like butter

And I didn't like it. It did make it again like it spread really well

I could spread it on cornbread and mixed with more flavors. Maybe I would notice it a lot less

But again, as a spread or as a topping, it just didn't do it for me

But then again, I don't know. maybe if I'd gone a month without butter because I'm in the survival situation

uh, maybe I would sing a different tune. But I decided that wasn't it

Uh, there was one more test I needed to do. And that was to try to use it in a frying pen

My wife said, why don't you fry an egg? Use this butter as

you know, the basin. That's what I always do. I know some people fry eggs in just oil or whatever else

I always use butter. The flavor is amazing, but it also works really well to grease the pan, right

Butter has awesome. flavor. Do the same thing when if I pan fry or pancyra steak, it's just so good with a good

butter. So I decided to try that. And I stuck some of the butter in a pan. And I fried the

butter. It didn't melt, which really surprised my wife. It was a little bit less surprising

to me. There's something about this process that they've that they've gone through to make it

into a powder that when I reconstitute it with water, it doesn't have the same property. It doesn't

doesn't melt. So even when I warm it up, like to some extent

some liquid will kind of sweat out of it. And if you look real close here at the frying pan you notice some little beads of moisture on the pan And so I do think some of the oils some of the fats that were in the powder have made it onto the pan and are kind of

maybe greasing it a little bit, but certainly not like you would expect butter to do. So something

about turning it into butter powder ruins that property and you are not going to be able to really

use this to grease anything. So that's where I stand on butter powder. The conclusion my wife

and I came to was we definitely want to keep some of this on hand. It has a shelf life of it says

10 years. And then once you open it, it says use it within a year. So it's pretty good from that

standpoint. It's made with real milk with real milk product, real butter. So I think it's a good

product. But just don't expect it to behave like real butter. I also was really impressed by the

pricing that they have. The fact that this comes in cheaper than real butter, that's not

typically the case with emergency food. So, anyway, props to Augustin Farms

I think they've done a great job, but I'm still gonna be using real butter

in my day to day. And that's the long and short of it. The other thing we often do with butter

with normal stick butter, is we do store quite a bit at home

and we just keep it in a freezer. It helps we have a lot of freezer space

I have three stand-up freezers in my garage. I prefer stand-up freezers over chest freezers

not from a space-saving standpoint, but from the being able to actually actually

access everything that's in my freezers. So we have a lot of freezer space and we do store

a lot of stuff in the freezer that I don't think a lot of people even realize that you can freeze

And butter is one of those things that we keep plenty of it on hand, both salted and unsalted

And that's how we do it. But we're still probably going to keep several cans of this

at least a few cans of this available for us so that no matter what happens

we can at least always have something that's very butterlike. And that, my friends

we're all about here. I'm willing to test things so you don't have to so that you can save a lot

of money not having to buy something and try it or buy something that you don't know if it's any good

and find out in the middle of some sort of an emergency that that is not what you want to have to live on

So if there's something else you would love me to try out and test here on this channel

I am all ears. Let me know in the comments below. And of course, I hope to see you in our next video