Here’s How Much Celebrity Chefs LOVE Butter
Updated: Nov. 02, 2023
Butter is a key ingredient for so many chefs. Find out what our favorite celebs have to say about butter. (Spoiler alert: They all love it!)
Julia Child
“With enough butter, anything is good.”
Julia Child, who introduced America to the wonders of French cooking, had a no-holds-barred love affair with rich ingredients like butter and cream.
Ina Garten
“Anyone who tries to make brownies without butter should be arrested.”
Ina Garten, also known as the Barefoot Contessa, is well known for the delectable baked goods she often makes on her eponymous Food Network show.
These brownie recipes will definitely keep you on Ina’s good side.
Anthony Bourdain
“I like butter. I like a lot of butter.”
Anthony Bourdain was never afraid to tell it the way it is in his bold, brash style. “[Butter] is usually the first thing and the last thing in just about every pan. That’s why restaurant food tastes better than home food a lot of the time—butter,” Bourdain once said on an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Here are 13 ways Anthony Bourdain changed how the world eats.
Michael Ruhlman
“I believe it’s a cook’s moral obligation to add more butter given the chance.”
James Beard Award-winning Michael Ruhlman is a familiar face to fans of the Food Network’s Next Iron Chef and Iron Chef America.
Christina Tosi
“Good butter makes every batch of cookies the best batch of cookies.”
Good ingredients ensure better results. Pastry chef and Master Chef Junior judge Christina Tosi, of course, knows this. Invest in good butter (these are our faves) and your bakes will turn out better and better.
Give Christina’s out-of-this-world confetti cake a try, too!
Jacques Pépin
“If you have extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter, it’s hard to beat bread and butter.”
Internationally acclaimed French chef Jacques Pépin is an avid cookbook writer and host of several PBS cooking shows, including Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home. The “Julia” is Julia Child!
Alice Waters
“Everything tastes better with butter.”
Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse fame, has always celebrated local, sustainable and seasonal cuisine.
According to food critics, you can’t make a wrong menu choice at Chez Panisse in Berkley, California. Here are 19 more of the best things you can eat in the United States.
Ree Drummond
“Butter, cream and bacon. That’s such a great foundation right there.”
The Pioneer Woman is well known for her love of comfort food. Her unabashed use of butter always has her fans clamoring for more.
Find out what one contributor learned after cooking like the Pioneer Woman for a week.
Ruth Reichl
“I couldn’t live without butter. Butter is probably my single favorite food.”
Gourmet editor-in-chief, TV host, and former restaurant critic for The New York Times, Ruth Reichl knows her way around the kitchen and restaurant dining table. It should come as no surprise, then, that butter tops her list of favorite ingredients.
Alton Brown
“There are no bad foods, only bad food habits. I eat cream, butter and bacon; I just don’t eat pounds of it at a time.”
Alton Brown, former host of the popular food science program Good Eats and current host of The Food Network’s Iron Chef America, knows a thing or two about what makes something taste good. And that thing is butter—but only in moderation, of course!
Paul Bocuse
“Without butter, without eggs, there is no reason to come to France.”
French chef Paul Bocuse was known as a leader in France’s groundbreaking nouvelle cuisine movement.
Sherry Yard
“Few people realize what a perfect ingredient brown butter can be for desserts. It adds a whole new flavor dimension.”
Sherry Yard is an award-winning pastry chef and has judged several baking competitions on the Food Network. And she’s never afraid of a little extra butter, browned or otherwise.
Originally Published: February 27, 2019
