Butter boards: Don't try this at home. It's just too much butter (2024)

It's a simple concept – spread butter on a board, add any number of flavourings from lemon zest, to bacon, to fresh flowers, then serve with bread which your guests use to scrape up the butter — like a dip.

The butter board is the latest internet food trend to take off and it was popularised by New York influencer Justine Doiron who added salt, lemon zest, honey, coriander and edible flowers to a slab of butter. Her original post has been viewed 8 million times on TikTok.

In the video, Justine credits the idea to American chef Josh McFadden and says she wants to make butter boards "the new charcuterie board".

But not everyone is on board.

"When I first heard about it, I was quite amazed to be honest," says Clement Remond, a Perth-based French chef.

"Especially as a French person. We put butter on bread, spreading it on the board like this looks a bit weird," he says.

"Personally, as a chef I wouldn't do that. It probably looks better than it tastes."

Put simply, he says a butter board just puts way too much too much butter on your bread.

"It's not a dip, it's butter," he says.

"I think that might be quite yucky to have it on a big board."

He's notanti-butter

"In France we use butter pretty much daily. In any dish we use a lot of butter and cream. French cuisine is all about that," Clement says.

"But nice butter is supposed to be a bit dense, with some salt inside. so I wouldn't imagine spreading it out on the board."

He's also very much in favour of adding flavour to butter before serving it — with a knife to spread it thinly.

"You can do a capsicum butter — cook some roast capsicum, blitz it and combine it with your butter," Clement says.

"You can do a pesto butter, even with a bit of curry powder — the beauty of cooking is just to get as imaginative as you can.

"You could do anything,even sweet potato butter … Feta butter, you can add different herbs — coriander, chillies, garlic.

"But do it as a small piece of butter on the table for people to put on the bread, not as a kind of labneh or hummus being dipped."

Listeners to ABC Radio Perth agreed.

Tash: "Tried my first butter board a few days ago. It's not worth the hype, even though it was excellent quality butter. It was a whole load of butter. And it was yuck."

Jill: "Butter boards … nope. Count me out, just leave me with the cheese boards."

Helen: "Butter board — previously known as a slice of bread."

But online, the trend is in spreading thick and wide.

"We decided to take our love for fairy bread to the next level,"saysthe person in this video by Hunger Hacks.

This recipe has sprinkles covering a layer of butter. Triangle pieces of white bread are then used to swipe through the topping.

It is unclear if this recipehas been tested on a typical summer's day in Australia.

Clement Remond spoke to Nadia Mitsopoulos on ABC Radio Perth.