The Better MELTED Butter Experiment

I finally did the butter experiment! I was planning on doing it Sunday evening, but someone made cookies with my room temperature butter... So I had to take some more butter out of the freezer.

The Question: What is the Best way to MELT butter in the microwave?

Hypothesis: Covering the butter will prevent the unwanted splatter.

The Problem: SPLATTER! When you microwave butter it heats unevenly which creates, super heated areas that pop and splatter.

The Experiment:

I took 3 sticks of butter, one at room temperature, one from the refrigerator, and one frozen.

Here is the butter, R for Refrigerator, RT for Room Temperature, and F for Frozen.

I unwrapped the sticks to cut them in half. I wanted to use the wrapper for the experiment, like this:

I moved the butter to the middle of the wrapper and then wrapped it back up like originally, minus one end. The opened end, I twisted the end and opened it a little, and placed in in a small microwave save bowl. This process of wrapping was done for the first half of the butter.

The second half of the butter was then place in a microwave safe bowl and covered in wax paper.  I cut a piece that was large enough to wrap the bowl. This created a cover to protect against splatter.

The Results:
Using the wrapper:
Room Temperature: Microwaved for 30 seconds, perfect melting with no splatter!

Melted Room Temperature butter.

Refrigerator: Microwaved 30 seconds not fully melted,

Refrigerator butter after 30 seconds of microwaving.

so I zapped it for 10 more seconds. Now if I had taken the wrapper out and stirred the butter, it would have been fine, but I decided to zap it some more and it splattered all over!

Frozen: Microwaved for 30 seconds, and very solid still. In the picture below, you can see there is no melt butter!

Frozen butter, after 30 seconds of microwaving.

So I zapped it for 23 more seconds (I got a pop and splatter with 7 seconds left.), and the butter still wasn't fully melted. But stirring finished the melting process.

After 57 seconds in the microwave, splatter and not fully melted butter.

Wax paper:
Room Temperature: Microwaved for 30 seconds, there was a little bit of splatter on the the wax paper, and I needed to give the butter a little stir to get perfectly melted butter.

Melted butter from room temperature start, with wax paper wrapping.

Refrigerator: Microwaved 30 seconds, there was still some solid but stirring melted the rest, and there was no splatter on the wax paper.

Melted butter from refrigerator, no splatter.

Freezer: Microwave 30 seconds, and it was STILL SOLID! Look: 

Butter from freezer still solid after 30 seconds of microwaving.

I zapped it for another 30 seconds, and with 9 seconds left, POP! But it was covered!

Melted butter with out having to clean the microwave afterwards.

Conclusion:
Wrapping the bowl in the wax paper will save you all the heart ache, the popping and splattering cause from the uneven heating in the microwave.


My Thoughts:
This was a fun little experiment. The idea of using wax paper, actually came from a little dispute Husband and I had. His idea was to create a water bath in the microwave using a bowl of water and a bag of water. I did not want to microwave the butter in a plastic bag for two reason, carcinogens and the mess! But I wanted to do something similar, so the wax paper cocoon came to be.

Also sorry about the photo quality! I need to pay more attention to my camera settings.