Do you feel you’ve lost your creative spark with cheese, charcuterie, breakfast, and dessert boards? Well, wait until you hear about butter boards. The latest TikTok food trend is probably exactly what you think it is. They are simply boards with softened butter spread on them served with fresh or toasted bread.
The idea first hit social media on September 15th when cook Justine Doiron posted to Instagram and TikTok hyping up the new twist on communal treats. These short and simple videos went viral and already have well over 8 million views.
“Have you heard of a butter board?” she opens. This is what one looks like, and I want to make them the next charcuterie board. Not to usurp charcuterie, but like maybe a little bit,” she says as she smears softened butter onto a wooden board.
While Doiron is certainly the reason these boards are enjoying a moment in the sun she clarified that she did not create the idea. She credits Joshua McFadden who included butter boards in his 2017 book “Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables,” which is co-authored by Martha Holmberg.
“(I) used to do them for farm dinners where you’d have a bunch of different breads and spreads on the table,” McFadden told USA Today. “It was an opportunity to present butter and add fun, seasonal ingredients to it that made the butter more than the sum of its parts.” He also insists that 2 or more butter boards “should never taste the same.”
And like all of its on-board predecessors that is the draw of the butter board, how customizable it is. These boards are constructed out of items that are kitchen staples and (at least until the butter shortage) relatively inexpensive. Creators can endlessly change up bread and how they season their butter making an infinite amount of flavor combinations. The cost and customizability make this an easy way to please a large crowd of people.
