Welcome to One Simply Terrific Thing, our ongoing series highlighting the small tools and kitchen goods that make life better!

I went a very, very long time without a butter dish.

There’s no good reason why. I just never got one, even as I winced every time I crumpled the ends of a butter wrapper to close it back up, smearing a bit of butter on my hands in the process, and knowing some of that butter was going to end up smeared along the bottom of my refrigerator drawer, too.

It was an ineffective system that I have now remedied thanks to the large ceramic Sweese butter dish ($21 from Amazon).

I like its classic looks and the tight-fitting beech lid, which has a silicone ring seal you can also remove if you just want the top to rest loosely on the container.

But most of all I love its size: it measures 6″ x 3.5″ by 2.7″ inches, which means it’s deep and wide enough to hold two standard sticks of butter (four if you really pushed it) or one European-style stick of butter, like Kerrygold or Plugra. It’s really more like a bowl for butter, and because it’s so deep it also prevents butter from hitting and sticking to the lid – a mess-free bonus! And while you have to hand-wash the lid, the container can be put in the dishwasher. (Yay!)

When I’m in bread-baking mode and baking a couple loaves a week, I just keep the butter container on my counter so the butter is always soft and ready to use.

Claudia has a butter dish very similar to this, and is also a major fan:

I love that I can scoop the butter out rather than have the butter sit on a tray. It also holds a lot of butter (which is great for my family) and stays clean thanks to it being more of a bowl. I also leave it on my counter. I haven’t had an issue with butter going bad, but we go through a lot of it!

Cheers to good tools that solve messy problems!