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When baking, butter is often mentioned as a crucial ingredient that significantly impacts the taste, texture and overall quality of a baking recipe. The creamy and soft fat, helps retain moisture in baked goods, keeping them moist and preventing them from becoming dry. Along with this, butter also adds a rich, creamy flavour to baked goods – thus enhancing the overall profile of cakes, cookies, pastries and savouries. In certain recipes, butter acts as a leavening agent, contributing to the rise and lightness of the final product as well as giving baked goods a golden crust or a desirable colour due to the presence of milk solids that aid in browning.
Browning
Whether you’re melting butter over a medium-low heat until it turns a deeper shade of brown to toss some fresh pasta in it, or using it as a base to make a delicious cream cheese frosting; once the butter is foaming and browned, the nutty flavours of brown butter are an ideal way to enhance the richness of cakes and cookies. Typically in baking, if you plan on using brown butter for a baking recipe, it is advisable to transfer the hot fat to a heat-proof bowl to cool and solidify, before it can be incorporated into recipes.
Creaming
In recipes, one often comes across an instruction that demands for butter and sugar to be creamed together. What that essentially involves is to combine ingredients and whip them until they turn light in colour and develop an airy-fluffy texture. The result of whipping butter for several minutes ensures that your cakes turn fluffy and aerated, with a crumb that is light when cut into with a fork or knife.
Pinching
Often times, to make pie crusts or biscuits chilled butter is rubbed into flour using the pads of one’s fingers until the mixture starts to resemble wet sand. Similarly, when cold butter is pressed into flour using the heel of one’s palm in a consistent movement, it allows the fat to adhere to the tiny particles of flour and melt only when heat is applied – thereby resulting in flakier pie crusts or pastries.
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Freeze & Grate
Recipes that usually start with frozen butter make the best kind of biscuits and scones. Usually, traditional baking techniques would involve dicing cold butter and using some kind of an equipment to mix it thoroughly into the flour; however, this technique of breaking down fat into even-sized pieces and letting them fall directly into your dry mixture allows the moisture from the fat to evaporate on baking, leaving one with a light and layered scone that isn’t dry between the layers.
Infuse
Whether it is for croissants or making a batch of compound butter to laminate dough, warm up your butter and add spices, herbs and flavourings of your choice before allowing it to rest for a few minutes. This results in an even distribution of flavour when the fat is mixed with other ingredients or can be mixed with some more plain butter and re-emulsified for later usage. Infusing butter works for both – sweet and savoury baking recipes like quiches, pies, croissants and more.
