The Type Of Butter Ina Garten Can't Stop Using

Anyone who watches her cooking show or reads her series of cookbooks knows that Ina Garten hardly ever settles for store-bought ingredients. On the rare occasion that she decides not to pick herbs fresh from her garden, or make chicken broth from scratch, the celebrity chef always opts for the highest quality products available at the store. As Garten admitted to Cooking Light, she usually sticks to the gourmet food aisle any time she visits the supermarket.

When it comes to butter, however, Garten has a different approach. While you might assume that the queen of "store-bought is fine" uses homemade butter made with fresh cream, Garten actually has a preferred store-bought brand. "I often use Cabot unsalted butter, but there are many good brands of butters available," she shared on the Ask Ina section of the Barefoot Contessa blog. Cabot brand butter, however, isn't the only type of butter she uses. Garten also has another go-to that is so special it can, in many cases, only be purchased online.

For most people, unsalted and salted are the only varieties of butter they keep in the fridge, but for Ina Garten, it's unsalted and truffle butter. "It really turns up the volume on everything from simple scrambled eggs to elegant fettuccine," she told Food Network.

To make her truffle butter-based recipes, Garten told Today that she prefers using Urbani's white truffle butter, which is made of 100% Italian white truffles. According to the Urbani website, it costs nearly $50 for 12 ounces, but considering how expensive white truffles are, it's a relatively fair price. If you're not willing to drop that much on one ingredient, Garten also recommends D'Artagnan brand white truffle butter (via House Beautiful), which you can buy for around $30 for 16 ounces. Garten herself orders six tubs of truffle butter at a time and keeps them in the freezer, she revealed to Food Network.

Ina Garten has a good number of recipes that call for truffle butter, most of which are pasta dishes. In one episode of "Barefoot Contessa" (via Food Network), she shared that during the holiday season, she makes mushroom fettuccine with truffle butter, in another, she makes mac and cheese (via YouTube), and in the "Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics" cookbook, she featured a recipe for tagliarelle with truffle butter as the main component of the sauce (truffle butter isn't exactly a "basic" ingredient, despite the name of the cookbook, but it is Ina Garten after all).

While pasta is clearly Garten's favorite medium for truffle butter, she also uses it when roasting turkey. As she demonstrated in a 2009 episode of "Barefoot Contessa" (via YouTube), you can simply use it in place of regular butter to keep the meat juicy. It's an easy way to take the flavor of food to another level, whether it be for turkey, pasta, or seemingly any dish — it's no wonder Garten buys it in bulk.