Butter is one of the most important ingredients you will need when you decide to start baking. It is also one of the most tasteful ingredients you will find when it comes to both cooking and baking. There are recipes that require you to use butter not just for flavor purposes but also for adding some depth and texture to your food. It is also one ingredient that helps to brown what you are baking or cooking perfectly.
As with most ingredients used for cooking and baking, butter can also prove to be somewhat difficult to work with. For example, if you don’t blend it properly with other ingredients, it will break or if you heat it up too much, it will burn. There are a lot of tips and tricks that experts use to make using butter easier and here are some of them:
Choose unsalted over salted – if you are told to add butter to a recipe but it is not specified whether or not you should use salted or unsalted, always opt for the latter. Remember, it is easy to add salt when your dish is bland but it is difficult to remove salt when it is too salty.
When you need softened butter in a flash – sometimes, recipes call for softened butter but you forgot this step when preparing to bake or cook. There is a way for you to soften butter without melting it. What you need is a ceramic bowl that is big enough to cover the butter, a porcelain plate, and a pot of hot water. Boil water and pour it into the bowl. Let the water sit for two minutes, just enough to warm the bowl. Place your cold butter on your porcelain plate. Pour out the water from your bowl into the sink and place the hot/warm bowl over the butter. Let this sit for two to four minutes or until the bowl is cooler. If butter is not totally soft to your liking, repeat process.
Perfect pie dough should be made with cold butter – do not use soft butter when creating pie dough since this will not produce the flaky crust that you want to have for such a recipe. Use cold butter cut in cubes or pats and add these to your flour, using your fingers to incorporate the butter into the flour. When you get a grainy mixture that looks like course groundmeal, that is when you add cold water to the mix. The cold butter and the cold water will help keep the butter intact and not melted. When baked, the butter will help create the pockets of air in the dough that will make it flaky.
Creaming butter should be done with pliable but not too soft butter – some people make the mistake of leaving butter out for too long before creaming it for their cakes and cookies. The perfect temperature for butter when you need to cream it is 65F, which is a consistency that allows you to press the butter easily and make an indentation while the butter still holds its shape.
