Can you tell the difference?

...stirring a bubblin' pot, Frank.

A blind taste test would probably confuse most connoisseurs/people, at best / least. ONLY your preferences will be satisfactory to you. Any other opinion will be met with ridicule.

Not only in cakes and cookies, but in general I switched to non-salted butter several years back. I can definitely detect the additional salt in recipes requiring butter where salted is used vs. unsalted.

With some things you can tell a difference especially if the butter is the main flavor in the recipe. If it's something like a chocolate cake though then you probably wouldn't notice the difference. Actually it's whatever you prefer. I prefer to use salted butter. I like to make things like croissants and Danish pastry and usually I use salted butter. I used unsalted butter one time and didn't like it as well.

I use unsalted butter- most recipes call for salt anyway, so why ruin what you are making with more. If I must use salted, I reduce the amount of salt called for in the recipe

I use unsalted butter- most recipes call for salt anyway, so why ruin what you are making with more. If I must use salted, I reduce the amount of salt called for in the recipe

Merry:

My yes you can. Especially in a butter cookie recipe. At Christmas time I bake a lot of cookies that are mostly butter, nuts and flour adn I can taste the difference. It might be because I generally have a low salt diet so can taste the difference more readily but I know many other people who can tell as well.

Chris

I think you misunderstood me- I never use salted butter in baking, but I have once or twice in a pinch. You can tell it's there, but if you gotta have a cookie...

I think you misunderstood me- I never use salted butter in baking, but I have once or twice in a pinch. You can tell it's there, but if you gotta have a cookie...

Why is that such a hard thing to do - reduce the salt in recipes?

I could taste the difference after a while on a low-salt diet (that was a mistake on the doctor's part), but otherwise, most people won't spot the difference. Thankfully, I don't do that low-salt thing now.

If you look at the sodium content of the butter in your fridge, you can calculate that there's about a teaspoon and a quarter in the whole pound of butter. The numbers below are so small that they need to be rounded unless we want a multi-page treatise.

The usual ratio shown in the nutrition panel is 90 milligrams of sodium in 14 grams (1 tablespoon) of butter. Sodium comprises about 40% of the weight of salt. That means roughly 225 milligrams or .225 grams of salt in a tablespoon of butter. Those numbers are rounded, but they're close enough. Extending that ratio to the whole pound brings you to 32 tablespoons X .225 grams = 7.2 grams salt per pound of butter. Various reliable sources give rounded numbers that range from 7 grams salt per pound up to about 9 grams per pound. When you think that 1 ounce = 28 grams, these are small numbers and a variation like this is essentially meaningless unless it's a serious health issue for some critical condition.

A cup of salt weighs about 12 ounces. A teaspoon of salt (1/48 of a cup) weighs about 1/4 ounce or 7 grams. A pound of butter is 2 cups volume and 454 grams weight.

A whole pound of butter will have about 1 1/4 teaspoons salt or about .3 ounces by weight or about 8.8 grams. One

1/4-pound (1/2 cup) stick of butter would have about .3 of a teaspoon salt or 2.1 grams and a tablespoon would have about .26 grams. About 1/4 of one gram of salt per tablespoon of butter; about 0.04 teaspoons, or less than 1/100 of an ounce of salt.

Now that you know that, you can use salted butter and compensate as you will for its salt content. My attitude is not to even count it. In very specific taste tests we did in my restaurants with recipes made with salted and unsalted butter, the several people who participated found no difference in taste or any other characteristic of finished products. Not even in candies or lemon curd and the like where you'd expect it to be of consequence.

Pastorio

Because, for one thing, the amount of salt in "lightly salted" butter is highly variable, by both manufacturer and batch.

We don't buy any but unsalted butter for any purpose.

-- Larry

I'm not making a judgment call on whether or not to use unsalted - that's gonna vary by recipe and by audience.

But i am going to point out that factories don't make butter by churning it in the sense that you and i recognize. They whip it up and then chill it, and the fat crystallizes and rises to the top. They do this with whole milk - they don't separate out the cream and then work on that.

Adding the salt during the crystallization process causes more of the milk solids to cling to the fat as it solidifies. These solids are responsible for much of the flavor of butter. Salted butter tastes better on a fresh biscuit not just because it has a little salt in it, but because it has more flavor in it.

Depending on the recipe and who you're feeding, subtracting a little salt from the recipe and using salted butter can work fine. But there's more to the problem than salt.

The salt is also a preservative, as it retards bacterial growth. The bacteria in butter produces butyric acid, which is nice in infinitesimal amounts, but nasty in large amounts. Unsalted butter may thus have less of the whey flavor and more of the butyric acid flavor.

Personally I keep a pound of unsalted butter in the freezer. If a recipe calls for it, I thaw it out and use it. It's just not that hard to keep it around.

Mary: LOL Of course if you gotta have a cookie, that bit of salt in the butter wouldn't stop me! NO way, no how. But I put my foot down at margarine. Just no excuse. I would rather have nothing.

Chris

Merryb wrote:

Margarine? What's that?

And if you want still more of that flavor, keep your butter in a butter dish on the kitchen counter at home, rather than in the fridge. It "ripens" and the flavor intensifies. Obviously, if it's very hot in the kitchen (more than 90°F), this won't work because the butter liquefies. There's no issue of spoilage or rancidity if it's used within a couple weeks.

The amount of salt in salted butter isn't enough to exercise much of a preservative value. It's a trivial amount compared to what was done it earlier times when it really was necessary because of lack of refrigeration and the present nuisance of rancidity. Butter in colonial America was heavily salted and had to be "washed" before it could be used.

Butyric acid is found as an ester naturally occurring in fats and oils. The butyric acid in *refrigerated* unsalted butter isn't much of a factor until it's been stored a long time, heading well into rancidity. Much longer than the usual retail sales cycles. It comprises between 3% and 4% of butter and doesn't become an issue until hydrolyzed out of its ester and the free butyric acid appears. It's a familiar unpleasant, acrid smell and taste found in rancid butter, Parmesan cheese, vomit and perspiration.

Agreed.

But I just don't see the value of doing it. Most recipes are written by recipe writers, not food scientists.

Pastorio

Sorry. No, it isn't. There are stringent standards for ingredients and process for the commercial manufacture of butter. If you look at the nutrition panels of butter packages of different brands and different batches, the numbers are constant. And they're constant because the law demands that the info be accurate, and because the public expects butter to taste a certain way and it's this way. Otherwise they don't buy it.

I'm sure that's the case. But there's no good reason that you've offered.

Pastorio

Amen!

I have a friend who always asks for my recipes and then asks "can you use margarine (non-fat milk, fat free whatever) instead?" Makes me crazy.

marcella

Marcella:

Does that friend then accuse you of not giving her the correct recipe because it doesn't taste anything like the ones you make? That burns my butt. I ask did you use a high quality, unsalted butter? Answer: Uhh, no. I used generic margarine, it's cheaper. Did you use fresh baking powder? Answer: Uhhh, didn't have any and didn't want to buy some just for one batch of cookies so I just left it out. Did you use at least the chocolate I recommended? Answer: Well, duhhh. That stuff is something like $6.00 per bag. They had the same stuff for $2.00 so I used that.

If I hadn't known her since childhood I would just have #$%& her! LOL. Hmm, I wonder why her cookies didn't taste anything like the ones she had raved so much about and demanded the recipe for. Let's see, the only ingredient on the list she used to specification was flour and the bit of salt. That she had the unmitigated gall to accuse me of recipe sabatoge so no one else could make the cookies, I'm still flabbergasted about it.

I should have known after the chicken soup fiasco of five years ago(same accusation, almost but same scenario, ignored recipe in favor of whatever logic floats in her brain and it didn't taste like my soup, go figure) but I figured baking is more an exact science than making soup. I didn't think she would be so bold as to substitute so pell mell with something like baking but I was soooooo wrong!

Tell your friend that you heard apples and peaches are a great fat free dessert! LOL. >>

Marcella Peek wrote:

- snippage -

Hilarious!

No, she doesn't accuse me of that. She just has to complain about every fat containing ingredient.

Oh, and she gets irritated when I bring dinner over (because she had surgery or whatever) and her kids like my mac and cheese or whatever better. That's when she asks for the recipe and then asks if she really has to use x ingredient. I just tell her (each and every time) that I have no idea, but she can try it but not to count on it tasting the same. She then says she wants to sub but doesn't want it to taste different. Good luck I say. It's so funny that we have to go through this every time. Really, do they think the answer is going to magically change?

Once she brought me brownies made with canned black beans pureed instead of butter. That was quite scary. I can't remember the odd ingredient in the oatmeal cookies but they were dry and dreadful. She insists you can't taste the difference but we clearly have different taste buds. :-)

marcella

LoL: Black beans? OK, I get that if you have food allergies or need to modify your diet because of health reasons that substitution is necessary but come on. Black Beans? Not happening. Can't taste the difference? Reverent wishful thinking on her part. My sis has to stay away from almost everything that tastes good, so I know how hard it is to make alternative dishes from those you love. My advice to your friend. Don't try to duplicate something you absolutely love with substituting things not even in the same species! What you do is make new dishes out of the things allowable and make them taste great.

No wheat, no dairy, no sugar, no chocolate. Do I try to make her a chocolate chip cookie that doesn't taste like sidewalk scrapings? No, I make a natural fruit filled fried rice dough dessert that tastes great. Does she miss chocolate chip cookies? You bet but as she says, if I gotta have one, I'll buy a good one and eat it, regretting the decision latter as her body gets angry with her choice. The key here is (1), not a package but one cookie.

It stinks but hey, I feel the same way about cookies and I don't have dietary restrictions, other than I shouldn't put that many calories into my mouth. If I have a cookie, it's going to be the real deal. Not some weird concoction that given the choice between sawdust and the substitute, sawdust would be a clear winner. I don't eat an entire batch of cookies. I have one or two. I don't need a low fat, no sugar cookie because I'm not planning on eating two pounds of the things, just one or two, once in awhile. Ahhh enough said.

Dang it, I dragged out the pulpit and didn't mean to rant on! LOL.

Chris

Marcella Peek wrote: