How Many Tablespoons in a Stick of Butter?

How do you use the tablespoon marks on a butter wrapper?

A recipe wants 5 tablespoons and the stick is still in its paper. That's the best state for it to be in. Lay it on a board, find the fifth line printed on the wrapper, and press a knife straight down through paper and butter together. I'd leave the wrapper on for the cut, since it holds the shape and keeps your warm fingers out of it, then peel the paper from the piece you need.

Before you cut, check which end the numbers count from, and whether the printing actually lines up with the ends of the stick. Wrappers can sit slightly crooked. If the marks look off, fold back the paper and judge by the butter itself: the stick is even from end to end, so its halfway point is 4 tablespoons no matter what the ink says.

A partial stick with no markings

Halve it, and keep halving. One cut gives you two 4-tablespoon pieces, a second gives 2 tablespoons, and a third gives 1. Three rounds and you can build any whole tablespoon count. Five is a 4-piece plus a 1-piece, and six is 4 plus 2.

Seven is the one I'd approach backward: slice off a single tablespoon and use everything else. It's a smaller cut, and a smaller cut leaves less to go wrong. The same thinking applies to any amount past three-quarters of a stick.

The fraction that resists all of this is ⅓ cup, which is 5⅓ tablespoons or ⅔ of a stick. Cut at the fifth mark, then add a sliver about a third of a tablespoon thick to account for the extra teaspoon. The page on tablespoons in a third of a cup has more on that awkward number.

The calculator above is handy for the tricky partials. Type ⅝ or 1½ sticks and it reads out tablespoons, cups, milliliters and grams together, and one whole stick comes back as ½ cup in the plan line. Ignore that line here: the wrapper is the measure. For a stick's worth of anything else, the conversion chart starts from cups or spoons instead.

Softened butter still counts the same

Softening doesn't change the amount, only how easy it is to measure. Soft butter squashes under the knife and the wrapper marks slide along with it, so I'd cut while the stick is still cold and let the measured pieces come to temperature on the counter. That's the order that keeps the count honest. Five cold tablespoons become five soft tablespoons, and there's no guesswork involved.

Do you measure butter before or after melting it?

Recipes that say "½ cup butter, melted" are asking you to measure first, and the stick makes that painless: one whole stick goes into the pan and all of it reaches the bowl. If you melt first and then pour into a measuring cup, a coating stays behind on the cup, which seems like a poor reward for extra washing up.

If a recipe specifically says to melt and then measure, follow it and pour into a liquid measure. For a partial amount, I'd still rather cut first. Six tablespoons sliced from a cold stick is more reliable than trying to read the same volume off a shiny, sloping surface of hot fat.

Leftovers and odd pieces

Fold the paper back around the unused part and put it back in the fridge, because those printed marks are worth keeping. Just count again from the cut end next time, since the numbers now start in the wrong place. Once a piece has lost its wrapper or been hacked into something irregular, the marks are gone and the fair move is to treat it as a rough amount, about 14 grams to the tablespoon if a recipe happens to give grams. Recipes that start in cups are the mirror-image question, covered on sticks of butter in a cup.