Learn how to make garlic butter with just 4 ingredients! Creamy, savory, and rich, it's a delicious topping for potatoes, dinner rolls, noodles, and more.
What’s better than regular butter? Garlic butter! This spread is rich and, well, buttery, brimming with savory garlic flavor. It’s quick to stir together, and it lasts for days in the fridge. Keep it on hand for slathering onto bagels and toast, tossing with noodles, dotting onto baked potatoes, and more. It’s such an easy way to amp up the flavor in simple, everyday meals.
How to Make Garlic Butter
This homemade garlic butter recipe has to be one of the simplest on the blog. It only calls for 4 basic ingredients:
- Unsalted butter,
- garlic,
- finely chopped fresh parsley or chives,
- and salt.
Big tip: In order for you to make this recipe, the butter will need to be at room temperature. Set it out on the counter at least an hour ahead so that it has time to soften.
When the butter is soft and spreadable, place all the ingredients in a small bowl, and stir until they are well-combined.
Enjoy the butter right away, or store it in the fridge for later use. So easy!
How to Use Garlic Butter
There are so many ways to use this garlic butter! Here are a few of my favorites:
- Spread it onto French bread or warm baguette for a yummy side dish, snack, or appetizer. You could even add the bread and butter to a cheese board or crudité platter!
- Use it to make garlic bread. That’s right! Making this easy garlic butter is the first step towards making homemade garlic bread. Find my recipe here.
- Let it melt over mashed potatoes. It’s fantastic on my regular mashed potatoes, Instant Pot mashed potatoes, and this garlic mashed cauliflower!
- Dot it into a baked potato. Or a baked sweet potato.
- Toss it with pasta to make a quick garlic butter sauce. Butter noodles don’t get better than this.
- Spoon it over simply cooked veggies, like sautéed mushrooms or steamed broccoli.
- Slather it onto homemade cornbread, jalapeño cornbread, or dinner rolls. The perfect side dish for almost any meal!
- Rub it over corn on the cob. Boiled or grilled!
- Or spread it onto a toasted bagel for a quick, delicious breakfast.
How do you like to use garlic butter? Let me know in the comments!
More Favorite Butters and Spreads
If you love this recipe, try one of these butters or spreads next:
- Herb Compound Butter
- Honey Butter
- Lemon Butter Sauce
- Homemade Labneh
- Romesco Sauce
- Classic Hummus
- Basil Pesto
Garlic Butter
Ingredients
- ½ cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh parsley or chives
- 2 garlic cloves, grated
- ½ teaspoon sea salt
Instructions
- In a small bowl, stir together the softened butter, parsley, garlic, and salt.
- Serve on toasted baguette or bake onto garlic bread. Find more serving suggestions in the post above.
Hi! If I wanted to make this and store it for those days where noodles with butter would save my life; what else would you add? Would you suggest your compound butters?
This garlic butter would be great over noodles! You could add herbs to it if you wanted more flavor.
I made this recipe substituting garlic cloves for 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder and 1 teaspoon of dried parsley and it was still wonderful. This will be my go-to from now on. Even my super picky eater loved it!
Good recipe. Next time I will cut the salt to 1/4 tsp. I did use unsalted butter.
Excellent combination of spices. I used this on my roasted chicken. Delicious!
So glad you loved it, Karl!
Delicious
I made this per recipe and, although I liked it, my family objected to the lemon zest flavor. I think I will make my next stuffed shells without it.
There isn’t any lemon in the recipe.
I know! Where did they get lemon zest from the recipe?
I am interested for your saurce recipe please
Perfect balance of salt! My son said it could be more garlic-y; maybe we’ll try a dash of garlic powder but all the bread disappeared – thank you!!
About how much does this make? In ounces or cups? Thank you!
How can i make this recipe lasts up to 3 months?
Hi, you can freeze the garlic butter for up to 3 months.
Deeeelicious!!!!
Made as written and it was perfect!
So glad you enjoyed it, Diane!
A little on a nicely seared steak is quite good.
I made this to put in my mashed potatoes. Delicious! Not too strong, not too mild. I used 2.5 cloves, salted butter (it was on sale) and left out the salt. Dried parsley worked fine. Can’t wait to try this on some fresh bread later on. Thank you!
Hi, Jeanine and Jack. This garlic butter is so delicious! I used it with grilled escargots. Yum!
https://magicskillet.com/recipe/oven-grilled-escargots/
Uhm! This recipe is amazing! I just sampled some to see if I needed to add anything, and it is delicious. No changes needed. (Although I did use table salt instead of sea salt.) I will have a hard time waiting until we celebrate Thanksgiving to eat it.
I’m so glad you loved it!
How long will it last if refrigerated
Hi Joan, about 2 weeks.
I like to use this on filet mignonette steaks. Excellent!
Can this butter be portioned and then frozen?
Yep, that would work fine!
Always the perfect accompaniment for my ribeyes and baked potatoes.
Heaven!
Very tasty and simple
So glad you loved it!
Thanks for the recipe but can you please tell me how much is 1/2 cup or 1/2 teaspoon.
Grams is a much more useful measurement
½ cup=125 ml
½ tsp= 2.5 ml
You can easily Google this as I’ve posted below.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en-US&sxsrf=ALiCzsamDfgMCMEF2Xz00O9Bzu9DA1HXLg:1672178413929&ei=7WqrY9-1N8mrqtsPwOSymAI&q=What+is+the+metric+equivalent+to+half+a+cup
This would be the perfect topping for my fresh sourdough bread loaf! Honestly nothing hits the spot more for me than some fresh, quality bread and butter!