What's The Difference Between Butterscotch Ice Cream And Butter Pecan?

Butter is one of the most versatile cooking staples known to man. You can use it in savory dishes and in sweet ones, in everything from steaks to sauces to baked goods. There's very little butter can't do.

The only problem is, because it appears everywhere, there's a lot of different things with "butter" in the name. Gooey butter cake, buttermilk, butter chicken, buttercream — these are all totally different items despite all having some aspect of butter to them. But hey, at least if you've got two different flavors of ice cream with "butter" in the name, like butterscotch and butter pecan, those have to be pretty similar right?

Actually, no, not at all. Butterscotch and butter pecan are wildly different, and it comes down to how they're made. In fact, butter is really the only ingredient they share (other than the basic ice cream components), and the only point of flavor overlap between the two. Beyond that, there's little they have in common.

Butter pecan is a classic staple of American Southern desserts, a decadent flavor whose primary drawback is that it might overwhelm you with its richness. It's made by taking pecans and toasting them in butter — that's where the name comes from — in order to bring out depth of flavor. You'll see things like butter pecan pie or butter pecan fudge, but the most common application is, of course, butter pecan ice cream, made by combining those butter-toasted pecans with vanilla.

It's now one of the classic American ice cream flavors. Not quite in the same ubiquitous category as vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate, but certainly in the next tier along with flavors like Rocky Road and pistachio. Interestingly, we don't actually know where it came from; there's a legend that it was the result of Black Americans not being permitted to eat vanilla ice cream during the Jim Crow era, but there's no actual evidence to back that up.

Butterscotch, meanwhile, is a lot closer to toffee and caramel than anything else. All of those are made by heating sugar until it caramelizes, but caramel is made with white sugar, while butterscotch and toffee are made using brown sugar and butter. This gives butterscotch a richness in common with butter pecan, but the flavor profile is totally different owing to a lack of nuts. Unlike butter pecan, we have a much clearer sense of where butterscotch came from: 19th century England, possibly as early as 1817. It was originally a type of hard candy, but as time has gone on, people have experimented with ways to incorporate the flavors into other desserts, including ice cream.

Though butterscotch and butter pecan have similar names, don't let that fool you. Both have the richness inherent to butter, but beyond that, they're not very much alike. They're both pretty tasty, though.