We Tried 5 Common Ways to Quickly Soften Butter—and This Is the Best

Every home cook has been there: you’re about to start baking and suddenly realize you forgot to take the cold hard butter out of the fridge. We’ve all done it and know how frustrating it can be. After a few choice words, your first instinct might be to throw that sucker in the microwave and nuke it for a few seconds. But please, don’t do that!

Take it from us: microwaving your butter isn’t worth it. You’ll probably leave it in there too long and end up with a soupy, buttery mess (we know from experience). Plus, if you accidentally push the butter past the softened point and closer to the melted point, you could affect your baked goods. It’s possible for butter to be too soft and when that happens, you can end up with heavy, dense, and flat baked goods—nobody wants that.

Now that we’ve made the case for avoiding the microwave, we’d like to introduce you to some easy butter-softening alternatives that the internet loves. These five tricks are designed to soften your butter quickly and effectively when you forget to pull it out of the fridge and leave it on the counter. We tested them all so you don’t have to, and we’ve ranked them based on the methods we’d use again. Here are our results:

The Internet’s Best Butter Softening Tricks, Ranked

1. Broma Bakery’s Defrosting Slab Trick

We know we said no microwaving, but hear us out—this is different! First, cut the butter into slabs and place them on a plate. Then, microwave it using the defrost setting for 10 seconds, flip the butter over, and microwave using the defrost setting for another five to 10 seconds.

The reason this method works without completely melting your butter is that the defrost setting lowers your microwave’s power to between 30 and 50 percent. So it won’t actually cook the butter; it will just slightly soften it.

This is the best method simply because it’s the quickest. The hardest part is cutting the butter into slabs, but even that takes less than a minute to do. After that, you microwave it for about 20 seconds total—though the exact time will vary based on your microwave (ours needed 25 seconds). You just can’t beat how quickly and effectively this method works.

2. Jennifer Garner’s Grating Method

Jennifer Garner isn’t just one of our favorite actors—she’s one of our favorite cooking show hosts too. And this hack further proves her “Pretend Cooking Show” deserves all the love it gets on Instagram.

When you’re in a bind, Garner suggests grating your butter. So, we grabbed our cheese grater and went to work. It took less than three minutes to grate the entire stick of butter—and it was actually a lot easier than you would think. Sure, you get a little bit of an arm workout in, but the cold butter grates really smoothly.

The trickiest part is near the end when the butter starts to melt under your fingers. It might get a little messy, but by then you can just throw that little knob of butter into your mixing bowl because it’s pretty soft. This method doesn’t give you traditionally “softened” butter, but it will make it a whole lot easier to beat together.

3. TikTok’s Hot Cup Hack

We’ve seen this trick all over TikTok—including from our favorite TikTok grandma, Babs. In this “Babs Hack,” simply fill up a cup of water with really hot water, dump it out, then place it over a stick of butter. After five minutes, the butter should soften.

This is the trick we expected to work the best. However, to our surprise, it didn’t work that great. Maybe we didn’t warm the cup up enough, but even after 10 minutes, the butter wasn’t as soft as it was in Babs’ video. It was still a little bit softer, and would definitely be better than a cold stick, but from all the TikToks we’ve seen about it, we expected a lot more from this hack.

4. Broma Bakery’s Body Butter

Ok, yes, this one is about as weird as it sounds. But according to Broma Bakery’s Sarah Crawford, this is one of her favorite butter-softening tricks. And since we loved Sarah’s microwave hack so much, we knew we had to try this one.

While you’re getting all your ingredients ready, pop that stick of butter into the front of your waistband. Then, you can multitask and start your prep. After five minutes, flip the butter to the next side. Now, Sarah doesn’t say if you keep flipping it until every side has had a turn, but that’s what we did.

We gave each side five minutes so that all four sides would have a chance to get the body heat because the butter softens the best when it’s pressed up against your skin. The only issue we found here is that it took 20 minutes for the butter to be softened—and even then it’s only slightly softened. So, sure, you can multitask for the first bit of time, but after a while, you’ll be standing around waiting for the butter to be ready. If this makes you wonder about how sanitary this might be—food safety and handling and all—you may want to only use this trick when baking for yourself or your immediate family.

5. Fit Foodie Finds’ Butter Butt

Sure, this is basically just Broma Bakery’s trick, but in the back of your pants—but the difference in results is astounding.

Unlike Broma Bakery’s trick, Fit Foodie Finds’ “butter butt” trick doesn’t come with much instruction. What you see is what you get: stick the butter in the back of your waistband to soften it. So that’s what we did—no timing, no rotating.

As you would probably expect, the side that’s touching your body is the one that gets the softest because it’s getting all the body heat. We let the butter soften for 30 minutes and while the side that was touching our back was so soft that it was squishy, the other three sides weren’t very soft at all.

In order for this trick to really work, you would need to rotate it (similar to how we did Broma Bakery’s trick). Especially because the side that’s touching you is so soft that one wrong move could cause the wrapper to slip off and you’d be covered in butter—next time we’d make sure the wrapper seam isn’t the one that’s touching us.

We do appreciate that this method is hands-free and you can multitask while doing it, but it still takes 30 minutes. So, just like with the other waistband trick, after a while, you’d be standing around waiting for soft butter, which we’re not sure is worth it. And again, you might not want to admit your butter-softening shortcut to anyone with this one.