What To Consider Before Baking With Costco's Kirkland Butter, According To Reddit

Reddit is a glorious place to accidentally lose hours of your day. The r/Costco Reddit thread alone has over 800K members and is an excellent hub for insider tips on how to navigate the Costco product line. It's thanks to this very thread that we learned the perils of cooking with the wholesaler's Kirkland Signature butter. One Reddit user noticed that their time-tested chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies were coming out flat and lifeless. However, when they swapped out the Kirkland butter they'd been using for over a decade with Kerrygold butter, there was a noticeable difference. With the next batch, their cookies had returned to normal. 

This anecdotal experiment points to a change in the constitution of the butter, and this Reddit user isn't the first to recognize that something is off. In fact, many across the internet claim that Kirkland's butter has increased its water content. 2024 was a rough year for the Kirkland butter brand, especially after Costco recalled nearly 80,000 pounds of butter due to a labeling issue.

Butter is typically made with a combination of about 80% fat and 17% water, with salt and milk solids mixed in. Gourmet butter will come with a higher fat content, which improves everything about your bake from flavor to texture. Interestingly enough, most of the complaints about the water content of Kirkland butter seem to be directly tied to the salted version. Unfortunately, Kirkland doesn't have their fat-to-water butter ratios posted anywhere.

Kirkland butter has often been compared to Kerrygold. So, if you're looking for a replacement that's more dependable, we recommend going for the (Kerry) gold. It will cost you a little extra, but you'll have complete peace of mind when popping that pie — or any other baked good — into the oven. If money isn't an issue, our favorite high-end butter brand is Rodolphe Le Meunier, which runs about $8.99 for 9 ounces.