I admit I’m a bit of a gadget queen. I love new kitchen tools, gizmos, knives etc. While visiting a lovely shop in Palm Springs a few weeks ago I came across a Butter Mill. I’m sure most of you are familiar with a butter bell that you keep on the counter that you load with butter and then submerge it in a water receptacle, which keeps it fresh. Now if you live up north where it gets really cold in the winter months and have short summers, it works great but if you live in Phoenix where the average temperature is over 100 degrees in the summer months, it doesn’t work so well and it’s a way to get rancid butter in a hurry. I tossed my butter bell after one summer in the Sonoran desert.

I only buy European style butter and Kerry Gold is my favorite. I don’t eat butter a lot but when I do, I want the good stuff. So when I saw the Butter Mill, it was a must purchase so I could give it a try.

The Butter Mill is stored in the refrigerator and whenever you are ready to spread butter on your toast you simply twist up the butter and avoid the ugliness of crushed toast with hard pats of butter. Now some of you are probably wondering why I don’t take the butter out and leave it on the counter to soften before I use the toaster, well it just never seems to work that way in my house. I always end up wanting toast on demand.

The down side to this device is that it is so fun to make what I like to call butter loops you may end up eating a bit more butter just so you can play with the mill again. It’s not like you are going to toss out the excess butter right?

The device consists of 5 pieces that were easy to take apart, wash and reassemble. Apparently a real person who actually used the mill wrote the directions because I was able to easily follow along. I also like the fact that you just have to split the European style butter in half to fit into the mill.

You can purchase it on Amazon for about $20.00.