Good point, carlmalone.

There are lots of argument to be made, for certain, but the most obvious of all, is that as a cook, it is important to be able to control the amount of salt in any given dish yourself. The use of salted butter eliminates that option. It also plays fast and loose with the flavor profile of your dish. I'd certainly rather use a high quality sea salt to season my dishes as opposed to the less refined version used to make cheap butter more palatable.

Additionally, the salt in the butter can mask unpleasant odors or flavors that your butter may have easily picked up from your refrigerator. That odor or flavor may make itself known in your dish once the butter has been incorporated with the rest of the ingredients- this of course depends on how delicate your dish is and/or how discerning your palate may be!

Salt is added to butter for flavor, but also as a preservative. Unsalted butter has a shorter shelf-life. Please note that although the amount of salt in the average stick of butter varies by manufacturer, it ranges between approximately 1/2 - 3/4 tsp. per stick.

I like good old fashioned salted butter on my toast, as unhip as that may be, but we tend to use unsalted butter around our house in every other application.

I have a pretty extensive set of stories on butter that we ran in the print magazine last spring. I'll upload them and link them to a new article in the next week or so. Keep an eye out, maybe we can stir up a little butter controversy!