For best results: let melted butter cool to room temperature before incorporating. Related: 7 cupcake recipes to indulge your sweet tooth How to make perfectly shaped muffins and cupcakes Perfect pastry: How to braid pie dough.
Recipe Collections How butter works: why recipes call for cold, soft or melted butter What you use will either give tenderness and lift, flaky layers, or soft density. Soft butter: soft cookies. Joseph Communications uses cookies for personalization, to customize its online advertisements, and for other purposes.
Learn more or change your cookie preferences. By continuing to use our service, you agree to our use of cookies. We use cookies why? Here's how to soften frozen butter or refrigerated butter without melting it. Test Kitchen Tip: If the butter you are softening for cookie dough melts, use it for another purpose and soften new butter for your cookies.
Once melted, the butter reacts differently with the dough and will give your cookies a different consistency. Not only is softened butter ideal for baked goods, it's also great for mixing in other flavors to create compound butters or seasoned butter like this lavender butter recipe for later. Try this mouthwatering herb butter , honey and green garlic butter pictured above , or experiment with adding your own mix-ins.
Softened Butter Tip: These flavored butters are also a great way to use butter that got too soft if you tried something like microwaving butter to soften it, but didn't use our defrost setting tip. Though softening butter seems like a step that could be easily skipped for the sake of time, it really only takes a bit of thinking ahead. Trust me, those few extra steps of prep work will pay off when you bite into that perfectly-baked chocolate chip cookie.
By Katlyn Moncada Updated October 19, Each product we feature has been independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team. If you make a purchase using the links included, we may earn commission. Save Pin FB More. Softened butter stick on wrapper wth knife. Credit: Jay Wilde. Cut Up the Butter: If you cut a stick of butter into smaller chunks or slices, it will soften more rapidly at room temperature.
Softened butter works well during the creaming stage of your recipe. As your mixer rapidly combines the butter and sugar, the beaters themselves and the sharp corners of the sugar crystals leave trails through the butter. The globules of soft fat molecules trap the air, as whipped cream does, while the crystallized molecules provide enough structure to keep them from combining together in large bubbles.
As your batter bakes, those tiny air pockets inflate with carbon dioxide gas from the baking powder or soda, and provide the final product with much of its lightness and height. Melted butter behaves very differently from softened butter, because both the crystalline fats and the softer fats are completely liquid. For baking purposes, the butter is now a liquid fat comparable to vegetable oil, providing the crumb with richness and softness but not contributing to its structure.
Baked goods made this way tend to have a relatively coarse texture, without the fine and delicate crumb of cakes made through the creaming method. In this instance, melted butter is used instead of oil because of its superior flavor.
When you need softened butter for a recipe and end up with melted butter, set aside the melted version for cooking or table use, then soften more for your baking. Grate cold butter or cut it into thin slices to help it soften quickly, or speed the process by kneading it or rolling it between sheets of wax paper. Avoid using your microwave, which heats the butter unevenly and is more likely to melt it. Fred Decker is a trained chef and certified food-safety trainer.
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