If you baked your Thanksgiving pies with anything other than
Coscto’s butter, consider yourself lucky. People on the internet are dragging the retail giant in a now-viral Reddit thread, claiming that the Kirkland salted butter in a blue box quite literally ruined their holiday desserts.
“I saw a TikTok where a baker had issues with a recipe and had made it with Costco butter for years but recently had been having issues….she finally tried with another butter and issue solved,” the original poster wrote on Reddit.
“Didn’t think much of it until Thanksgiving. We use butter for our pie crust recipe and that crust would not hold up! 2 batches just crumbly and could not get it to roll. Went to store got different butter…..and what do you know…..same recipe, worked again.”
They were hardly the only bakers with this issue. In fact, it seems to be a baking epidemic.
“Wait, are you kidding me? My thanksgiving pie crust totally gave me ‘crumbly’ issues and I’m usually a pie pro. I stock up on the blue box Costco butter and used it,” one person wrote.
Another added, “My wife’s pie crust also didn’t turn out well. She uses unsalted butter for baking, but it’s still the Costco brand.”
“All of a sudden one day my chocolate mousse turned out wonky & I knew it was the butter because it wouldn’t blend properly,” another customer wrote. “I used a different brand than Kirkland and made it again with no issues. Previously, however, I had used Kirkland brand butter for a few years & it worked fine.”
According to several users, the problem seems to be the salted butter has a higher water content than it used to. “It’s a change in the water content. This happened to my crust last year and a few friends mentioned it this year,” a user wrote, They added that they are using “Kerrygold only for baking from now on.”
Other bakers echoed this statement, agreeing that there was a higher water content in the butter, and that Kerrygold is the best route for baking. However, a fellow baker actually placed blame on Costco’s sugar.
“I started having issues with my baked goods earlier this year. By process of elimination, I determined the Costco organic cane sugar was the problem, not the Costco butter,” the person wrote. “Organic sugar was releasing too much liquid during baking. I had been using it for a few years, but had to switch back to C&H.”