When Recipe Calls For Melted Butter
Allowing your butter to sit at room.
When recipe calls for melted butter. Is the amount the same hard or melted. Melted butter can be used in many recipes and often it is stirred into a dry mixture along with other wet ingredients such as eggs and milk. The vast majority of baking recipes call for butter to be cooled down after being melted and before being added to the rest of your ingredients but very few recipes define how cool the butter. Most tasters preferred the recipe as written using unsalted butter.
But what the heck does softened butter mean. What you need to know is that melted and softened butter behave differently in your baking and aren t interchangeable in most cases. Instead it gets broken down into small pieces throughout your dough. Butter can be used many ways in baking depending on the result you re looking for.
Muffins or coffee cakes sometimes call for it to be melted and simply poured into the batter. 1 2 cup of butter melted does that mean that you measure the hard butter or melt it and then measure. When a recipe calls for ie. The only times when you want to melt the butter first and then measure it out are when your recipe calls for butter that is primarily used in a liquid form such as browned butter clarified butter or ghee.
Melted cold and the enigma softened. Growing up i didn t like using a mixer if i could help it so i would always melt the butter regardless of what the recipe called for. If your recipe calls for melted butter alone then you have a better chance of similar results with an oil substitution. Almost any baking recipe that calls for butter tells you what state the butter is supposed to be in.
But here s the good news. When it comes to chocolate chip cookies for example i like to use melted and cooled butter because it leads to a chewier rather than cakier finished cookie. Since butter is about 18 percent water. This is because historically all butter was salted butter with unsalted butter being very expensive before the advent of refrigeration due to its low shelf life.
This may sound silly and basic but i need an answer to this question. If you re baking a recipe that calls for unsalted butter or doesn t specify a butter and you only. The melted butter and oil are both liquid fats so they will react similarly in the recipes. Butter that s straight from the fridge doesn t get fully incorporated into a batter.