Why butter temperature is so important to baking... Whether softened or cold or room temperature, applying the right kind of butter can be surprisingly tricky
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In pretty much every baking recipe, no matter the diversity of the ingredients or range of final products, you can almost guarantee one thing: If the recipe calls for butter, you’re going to be told what temperature that butter should be. In pie, butter must be refrigerator-cold. In cookies, for the purpose of creaming with sugar, butter is best at room temperature. In breads — well, that depends. The number of guises butter wears in everyday recipes is enough to make you stare longingly at a bottle of canola oil: If we only used oil for everything, life would be so much simpler. “Butter temperature is really complex,” Jesse Szewczyk, author of the cookbook Cookies: The New Classics, says, and even an experienced baker can get it wrong.
Using butter in cookies
Typically, the first step in making cookie dough is to cream butter with sugar, a process that is a real challenge with cold butter. But the recommendation that you keep butter at room temperature before beginning cookie dough (four hours is a good average metric for how long it will take to warm) is not just so the butter is soft enough to cream. “Room temp butter is able to hold onto air,” Szewczyk says. “You can mechanically shove air into it by creaming. Warm butter is not able to hold onto it, so you’re going to get a denser dough.” When using warmer or melted butter, cookies will struggle to lift and lighten, resulting in a cakier texture, like brownies. For that reason, Szewczyk warns against the common hack of first softening butter in the microwave. “It skews between melted and softened, so the butter is unable to hold as much air.”
Before baking cookies, many recipes will also recommend that you put the cookie dough in the fridge for several hours or overnight. (It’s one of the reasons that you buy cookie dough in the refrigerated aisle of the grocery store.) This, Szewczyk says, is to make sure that your cookies stay plump when baking. “Warm butter will obviously melt faster in the oven and spreads quicker.” If you’re making a cookie dough with a high fat content, it’s important to chill your dough before baking, or else the cookies may not be firm enough to keep their structure when they bake.
Though Szewczyk recommends these steps for cookies generally, his book’s recipes actually call for a lot of melted butter. “I would say 75 percent of my cookies are made with melted butter — and people often ask me why,” he says. “It’s because my personal preference is for a denser cookie.”
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https://www.eater.com/23281193/best-...n-butter-usage