The Staggering Amount Of Butter Ree Drummond Goes Through

Anyone who watches "The Pioneer Woman" knows that Ree Drummond loves cooking with butter. She doesn't skimp on it in any recipe and even went so far as to declare, "Butter is a church of which I am a member. If butter ran for president, I would vote for it" in a Pioneer Woman blog post. 

This statement may seem like an exaggeration, but it isn't uncommon for the celebrity chef to use up to two sticks of butter per recipe, most famously her bread and her Texas sheet cake, the latter of which she admitted to Taste of Home originally had two cubes, not two sticks.

As you might expect, all that butter adds up fast. And considering Drummond is always testing recipes for both her cookbooks and Food Network show on top of feeding her big family, she goes through quite a lot of butter. In case you were wondering just how much that amounts to, Drummond actually calculated it and shared the surprising number on The Pioneer Woman.

According to Time, the average American uses 23 sticks of butter throughout the course of a year. The number has dropped significantly since the 1920s, when Americans were consuming 72 sticks a year, but Ree Drummond still exceeds both averages by a lot. The Pioneer Woman revealed in her blog that she had once gone through exactly 484 sticks, or 121 pounds, of butter in a span of 15 days. As Drummond clarified, this number was on the conservative side — she didn't count the amount of butter used to make meals for her TV crew.

Though using that many sticks of butter over a two-week period is staggering in itself, it isn't uncommon for the cooking show host. In her memoir "Frontier Follies," Drummond revealed that in the first season of "The Pioneer Woman" alone, she used 131 pounds of butter (via the New York Post). That means she went through a whopping 524 sticks of butter in only six episodes, judging by a conversion chart from Erren's Kitchen. 

Drummond admitted in "Frontier Follies" that the number has since gone down to 75, a much more reasonable amount given that the number of episodes per season is a lot higher.

Most people buy two to four sticks of butter at a time, but Ree Drummond shared in the Autumn 2018 issue of The Pioneer Woman magazine (via CheatSheet) that she instead stocks up on 10 to 15 pounds per month. 

And even though she buys a good amount of the ingredient, Drummond doesn't just grab whatever is on sale. Instead, she's partial to Land O'Lakes butter, claiming the brand "has been stacked in my fridge since the dawn of time, and even before then" (via The Pioneer Woman).

Drummond's lifelong commitment to Land O'Lakes is what led to her partner with the brand in 2012, as she explained on her blog. To this day, The Pioneer Woman still recommends Land O'Lakes as one of the best butter brands. And we can only assume she knows what she's talking about when it comes to butter, considering how much of it she uses.