I stopped scrolling and watched twice when it popped into my feed: a video of a well-manicured woman lighting a candle and dipping bread into the melting waxy puddle that turned out to be… butter?!
Butter candles make perfect sense by the standards of current video-heavy social media algorithms: they are visually arresting and mildly controversial, leading to that ever-valuable boost in engagement.
I would never have tried to make a butter candle if I hadn’t shared the video in my Instagram stories and several friends reacted to say that they would, in fact, try the butter candle. One friend informed me that a local restaurant makes beef tallow candles. Another suggested pairing a butter candle with crab legs.
Increasingly intrigued by the notion of a butter candle, a phrase that has a “cellar door”-esque harmony to it when spoken aloud, I decided to make my own. Hey, I already possessed a pound of butter.
First, I went to an expert on edible candles. Miguel Angel Olivas is kitchen manager and butcher at the 1889 Steakhouse in downtown Missoula, and he saves a lot of beef fat. For a festive addition to special meals, he crafts herb-infused beef tallow candles that are set atop the diner’s steak to enrobe it with melting beef fat. Woof. He can’t remember which restaurant he got the idea from, but apparently it’s been a fine-dining trick for a long time. “I like old recipes and making things from scratch,” he said.
Tallow candles have been used throughout history as a cheaper alternative to cleaner burning, pricier flammables like beeswax or oil. It sounded like a better substance to work with, but I have vegetarian friends, so tallow was out of the question.
Olivas warned me that if I made a butter candle, it would be trickier, because butter melts at a different temperature than tallow. He thought it would be better to use clarified butter, which has a high melting point.
“Keep your butter candle in the freezer until right before you’re ready to use it,” he said.
Armed with this knowledge, I felt assured that I was going to make the butter candle, bring it to a party and my friends would adore me. Did I google any further instructions? No, I sure didn’t.
Instead I gathered my materials and set about clarifying a pound of butter, making a real mess in my kitchen. (You can buy clarified butter or tallow at the grocery store, by the way. I later found both on the same shelf at the Good Food Store.)
Making the candles was easy enough. I poured the hot butter into silicone muffin liners, dipped in the kitchen-twine wicks, each weighted with a slice of garlic clove, and carefully slid everything in the freezer.
I decided to unveil these creations at my brother and his husband’s annual gingerbread party, where a bunch of adults do their worst at decorating a big batch of cookies. While my brother was mixing up royal icing, I was bragging to everyone about my butter candles. I bought a fancy Grist bread loaf and some shrimp to dunk in lieu of crab legs. I invited everyone to behold my butter candles.
I shoved the candle inside of a divot carved into a loaf of bread, like I’d seen in the TikTok video. I flicked the lighter on the wick and the flame grew high for a moment, and the butter glistened. And then… it went out.
I lit the other wick. Poof.
Same with my backup candle.
Flick, light, poof.
I tried several times but I just could not get the butter candles to stay lit, and friends were encroaching on the shrimp. At last I gave up and microwaved the butter in a little bowl, discarded the wicks, and none of the partygoers complained about dipping shrimp and fancy bread into garlicky clarified butter.
For me, at least, butter candles proved to be a viral internet craft project that’s too good to be true. The not-so-devastating outcome was that everyone enjoyed dipping bread into melted butter, sans burning wick, at a festive holiday party. Later, I tried a few different techniques to get the damn thing to work, including braiding a thicker wick and letting the butter come to room temperature, but to no avail.
The butter candle failure reminded me about a crucial principle of cutesy holiday craft videos on social media. In our attention-based digital economy, creators must continually produce novel, entertaining content that garner views, because this translates into dollars for monetized channels. It doesn’t matter if you, the viewer, can or should actually make the thing.
I feel a little guilty that for this article, I’ve also created content out of almost nothing, although more with the aim of distracting myself, friends and readers from the very real despair of modern day life for a moment. (Please donate to The Pulp for its actual journalism, and thank them for humoring me when I pitch this stuff.)
But! Hope—and reality—is not lost, and so now I’ll share something you can actually learn from reading this. If you want to see an actual edible candle made by a professional, 1889 Steakhouse is planning to serve tallow candles at a special New Year’s Eve dinner. Olivas says you can find out more by calling 1889 or following them on, of course, social media.
