Bantha butter, or blue butter, was a blue-hued butter made with the blue milk produced by banthas. The mellow butter tolerated heating and was useful for cooking foods, such as dumplings and bantha-butter pancakes, but the results could be bland in flavor. On Starlight Beacon, it was served with yellow chime fruit preserve on seed bread. The human Tasu Leech suggested pairing sautéed Trandoshan liver with bantha butter.
Banthas produced the blue milk used to make bantha butter.
While the Starlight Beacon space station was in operation in 231 BBY, the kitchen droids in its dining facility served foods that included freshly baked seed bread with thick blue butter and yellow chime fruit preserve. During a visit to the station, the human Jedi Padawan Reath Silas got that bread.
In 3 ABY, the Devaronian executive chef Torro Sbazzle was asked by Lando Calrissian, Baron Administrator of the gas mining colony Cloud City on the gas giant Bespin, to prepare food while under occupation by the Galactic Empire. Calrissian's involuntary "guests" included the Sith Lord Darth Vader, who Sbazzle presumed was human like most Imperials. When Sbazzle chose to make dumplings, she considered using bantha butter to cut her midnight-hued pastry flour because it was less likely to burn than zaffa oil and had less flavor. As it might have been the last meal she ever cooked, she decided she would not die for bland dumplings and chose the oil instead.
In the same year, the Trandoshan bounty hunter Bossk'wassak'Cradossk, known as Bossk, appeared to have frozen on the ice planet Jekara before he was discovered by a group that included the human pit fighter Tasu Leech. After Leech suggested to his companions that they abandon or kill Bossk, he asked if they had ever tasted sautéed Trandoshan liver with bantha butter, at which point the Trandoshan leapt up, put a knife to Leech's throat, and threatened to flay the human. In 4 ABY, the musician Jess ate pieces of haroun bread smeared with bantha butter for breakfast in the palace of the crime lord Jabba Desilijic Tiure.
In 34 ABY, aboard the Halcyon, an MPO-1400 Purgill-class star cruiser, spiraled discs of blue bantha butter were part of a pastry board available to cruise guests during breakfast service in the Crown of Corellia Dining Room.
Bantha-butter pancakes were a flat food that the pirate Hondo Ohnaka once compared with the result of a turlossus stepping on something with its gigantic foot. He witnessed that scenario on the moon Dhandu 3 when two Pakiphantos members of Trunc Adurmush's gang got flattened by a turlossus.
Cover art by Annie Wu for Pirate's Price, in which bantha butter was first mentioned
Bantha butter was first mentioned in the current Star Wars canon in Pirate's Price, a 2019 novel by Lou Anders. It first appeared in "But What Does He Eat?," a short story by S.A. Chakraborty published in the 2020 anthology book From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back. On February 22, 2021, StarWars.com previewed the Bantha Blue Butter Sandwich Cookies recipe from the cookbook Star Wars: Galactic Baking; the recipe first identified blue butter as an alternative name. The cookbook, which Insight Editions published on May 4 of that year, referred to the substance as both "Bantha butter" and "blue butter."
A StarWars.com preview of Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser that was published on November 17, 2021 mentioned blue bantha butter as one of the foods inspired by Star Wars storytelling. The immersive experience at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida opened to the public on March 1, 2022. Guests can consume the butter during breakfast in the Crown of Corellia Dining Room.
In the Star Wars Legends continuity, bantha butter was first mentioned in the short story "Soup's On: The Pipe Smoker's Tale," written by Jennifer Roberson and published in the 1995 anthology Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina. Unlike the canon version, the Legends version of bantha butter was described as green in the comic book Legacy 4, which was written by John Ostrander and published by Dark Horse Comics on October 11, 2006. In Legends, blue butter was first mentioned in the 2002 Star Wars: The New Jedi Order novel Rebel Stand, which was written by Aaron Allston as the second book of the Enemy Lines duology, but it was not explicitly associated with banthas.
- Star Wars: Galactic Baking