31-05-2025
Forget Lurpak – Gen Z has gone wild for a new kind of bougie butter
Boomer: Why is the blender out at 9am?
Gen Z: I need exactly three hours to prepare my homemade butter.
The Lurpak is in the fridge.
This isn't just any butter…
It's M&S butter?
It's wunderkind chef Thomas Straker's bone marrow and burnt chilli butter recipe, which has racked up 19 million TikTok views.
Sounds like what you'd get if Satan opened a deli.
TikTok's crazy for it. 'I audibly moaned watching this,' one user wrote. Another called bone marrow butter their 'Roman Empire'.
I'm not convinced the Roman Empire was founded on spreading spruced-up beef fat on toast.
If you're not feeling the bone thing, give TikToker Mary Amzekria's saffron and cinnamon honey butter a go. Her recipe has 157,000 likes.
What about my cholesterol? My doctor will go mad. I'll leave the honey-infused fats to your unsullied arteries.
Judge away, but searches for flavoured butter on are up 444 per cent this year.
Like that fancy salted one they serve at Côte brasserie? See, I'm au fait with foodie trends.
Not quite. Waitrose's three most popular butter recipes are nduja, stilton and cowboy.
Does that last one come with a Stetson hat and leather chaps?
It's a mix of butter, garlic, mustard, lemon, chives, parsley, paprika, chilli and horseradish.
Not churning up my appetite.
It has buttered up writers at the Financial Times, who have described haute butters as 'disgustingly moreish' and the 'elite category of condiment'.
Heresy! In my opinion, the only 'elite' condiment is Flora melting into a Warburtons crumpet.
Eww! Flora is margarine. It's full of ultra-processed ingredients – worse still it's not even salted!
What about all those adverts in the 1970s and 80s about it being low calorie and better for your heart?
Total con! Appaz, margarine has nearly as high a plastic content as the tub it comes in.
So it's a choice between piling on the pounds or ingesting so much plastic I'm essentially half Tupperware?
Don't you listen to Dr Tim Spector's Zoe podcast? The fats in butter are apparently good for your gut microbiome, so they could actually help you to lose weight.
And what's Dr Tim's standpoint on you infusing your butter with the contents of Tesco's sweet treat aisle?
He wouldn't be best pleased. But if you insist on plain butter, at least make it Les Prés Salés.
With a name that posh I'm betting a tub costs about the same as my first car.
It comes as a fancily wrapped block, obviously. And it's only £5 for 250g, which is great value for what one TikTok taster described as 'the best butter in the world' and 'so good, it makes me emotional'.
For a fiver, I'd want it to spread itself and sing me a tune while doing it.
Five pounds is nothing. Manchester brand Pollen's £10 Croissant Butter with white chocolate is so popular, it even has a hundred-strong waiting list.
A butter selling out faster than Oasis tickets. Whatever next?
The real spenny stuff is served at restaurants. Diners pay £199 for the tasting menu at London's Michelin-starred Frog, the main event being chicken-skin butter and bread.
I'd suggest you dunk a slice of Hovis in the remnants of the roasting tin. That's free.
Then there's Plates, the first vegan Michelin joint, famous for its bright green whipped spirulina butter.
That looks like someone's mixed butter with their neighbour's lawn trimmings.
It really pops on your Instagram story.
I should've known it would have something to do with 'collating your Instagram aesthetic'. Anyway, let me try this bone marrow concoction you've made.
What do you think: butterly delicious?
I Can't Believe It's Not Better.
