A Baking Question

[genevieve]

I always wondered who was buying the salted butter

[nubka]

Thanks for all the helpful advice everyone! I'm going to buy some bananas tomorrow and give it a whirl...

I love baking/cooking threads - so fun to read!

[milanessa]

But the burning question is...will you use salt or no salt?

[nubka]

But the burning question is...will you use salt or no salt?

Well, I'm going use my salted butter and just add a pinch of salt.

[emason]

Salted butter is not the same as unsalted butter with salt added. Salt is a moisture retainer, so the amount of moisture in unsalted butter is different than the amount in the corresponding size of salted butter.

AS for me, I use salted butter 99% of the time, no matter what the recipe calls for, and I use the amount of salt called for in the recipe. No complaints from any of my food testers so far.

[jamesy]

No wonder us failed bakers have failed. So many opinions. Well, maybe not but it makes me feel better.

salted vs unsalted is the new Mao vs Yuna

[vesperholly]

I always wondered who was buying the salted butter

Me - I can tell the difference when I have toast with butter, or any meal in which I can taste butter directly.

The word "salt" is starting to look weird now

[nubka]

salted vs unsalted is the new Mao vs Yuna

Lol!!

[cruisin]

I try to get whatever butter a recipe calls for. But, if I have salted butter, I still add the salt, just a bit less.

Milanessa, baking can be tricky. With general cooking amounts are not critical. With baking it's almost like chemistry - and the amounts/sifting/kind of flour is critical. My Italian grandma taught me to cook. She cooked by throwing handfulls of things into a pot, tasting it and adjusting. How she managed to be a great baker is beyond me! But, she passed her techniques on to me. My daughter, however, makes chicken and rice and beans. My son is an excellent cook.

Salt assit with the leavening process. Omit the salt and the item will be denser than you expect.

Real Tuscan bread has no salt. It is very dense and has a slight sweetness to it, even though there is no sugar in it. It tastes strange, at first. But, once you get used to it it is delicious. I make a Tuscan soup (Ribollita), that calls for Tuscan bread layered through it. I make the soup exactly the same as I've had it in Italy. But the breads here all have salt, so that changes the density and flavor a bit. I suppose I could bake my own bread first, but the soup is so much work!

[Vagabond]

Why would anyone use salted butter in the first place, let alone add salt to salted butter for a recipe calls for unsalted butter?

We (North Americans, that is) get more than enough salt in our diet as it is, and you can't be certain how much salt is already in salted butter.

[TheGirlCanSkate]

Why would anyone use salted butter in the first place, let alone add salt to salted butter for a recipe calls for unsalted butter?

The amount of sodium is on the label.

Unsalted butter spoils quickly. I don't use margarine. So I use salted butter because a stick can last in a butter bell/container for over a week. Unsalted will spoil and rancid butter is disgusting.

[danceronice]

Salted butter preserves it longer, though for modern people using a refrigerator it's such a minor difference as not to matter. It's actually not enough salt in the salted butter to really affect the taste much when it's used in cooking, but unsalted butter is still preferred.

The #1 reason people "fail" at baking (including people who are absolutely astonishing cuisine cooks, including pros) is baking is method, cooking is art. In culinary school the instructors would even say they could spot a baker in the students a mile off (one teacher referred to me as "methodical.") You have to be really careful, especially with raised doughs, to follow the directions. Never change ratios or make substitutions unless you're very sure what you're doing as it will completely change your results. It probably has the most math of all culinary courses, too--in baking, they're formulas, not recipes, for a reason.

Even then, weather, temperature, humidity, oven variations can all screw with you and you wind up with things not coming out how they should. Ingredient quality can vary, too (if your chemical leaveners are old, things won't rise like they should, the wrong flour can seriously alter the texture, swapping out kinds of sugar is basically altering the wet ingredients, if you use eggs that are bigger or smaller than called for you'll get weird things with the protein...) Baking can be really hard. (I still prefer it to cuisine, but I get why there are people who just hate it.)

[nubka]

Why would anyone use salted butter in the first place, let alone add salt to salted butter for a recipe calls for unsalted butter?

Because it tastes good, of course!

[maatTheViking]

Unsalted butter tastes bland to. I only get unsalted if I know I will use it all for baking.

While making cakes and pastry is very much like science, baking biologically leavened bread (yeast, sourdough) is both art and science. You can 'feel' when a dough is kneaded enough, and feel and se when it has risen enough (for instance temperature has a huge impact on how long bread should rest).

My mom always makes her own bread, and I 'helped' from a very young age. It is something that is best learned from a master

[danceronice]

Oh, and check the expiration date on your yeast (and make sure, though this is more a problem for those of us using vintage and antique cookbooks, that it's the right KIND of yeast-the directions for fresh yeast and packeted dry yeast and instant yeast are different.)

Really, baking sets out to make you be as anal as possible...and then little things will still get you. You just keep practicing. My mother never really was taught by anyone but she makes great bread (really makes, I mean, there are no bread machines in our house.)

[asdf334]

Really, baking sets out to make you be as anal as possible...and then little things will still get you. You just keep practicing. My mother never really was taught by anyone but she makes great bread (really makes, I mean, there are no bread machines in our house.)

Yes, and no. Yes in that you have to be precise with the measurements. Here's the no: 1) I feel like if you try TOO hard to do everything just right you usually end up with something worse. 2) To a certain extent baking is about following visual cues and experience. As an example, you can't simply just cream the butter for 2 minutes if that's what the recipe says. If it's not light and fluffy after 2 minutes, you need to keep going or you're not going to get the proper aeration needed for say, a cake.

[danceronice]

Yes, and no. Yes in that you have to be precise with the measurements. Here's the no: 1) I feel like if you try TOO hard to do everything just right you usually end up with something worse. 2) To a certain extent baking is about following visual cues and experience. As an example, you can't simply just cream the butter for 2 minutes if that's what the recipe says. If it's not light and fluffy after 2 minutes, you need to keep going or you're not going to get the proper aeration needed for say, a cake.

Ehhhh...to an extent, yes, it's learning to judge when it's right, but you can't skip the creaming step (or puree it instead). If you decide to use three eggs instead of one, it's not going to work as intended unless you change everything else (using the right formula to figure amounts, not just tripling everything.) You can learn to cook entirely on feel, but real feel in baking comes only with experience and still can't substitute for formulas. For baking, at least, I don't actually need directions, I just need the formula. (But I'm coming at this from the professionally-trained end. And some cookbooks that aren't really home-cook friendly operate on the same assumption, ie "Saute the garlic in the usual way", "add the normal amount of cream," etc.) And when you're starting out, going on feel is more likely to harm than help.

[kwanfan1818]

My grandmother could bake wonderful cookies -- I can't remember the name of the ones that were like biscotti -- by grabbing handfuls of flour and sugar, and she used whatever eggs were in the house. I never understood how this worked. Nothing she baked was delicate, but everything was great. She also baked a mean challah, but stopped when her arthritis got bad.

[jeffisjeff]

Yeah. As another example, I discovered the hard way that melted butter is no substitute for softened butter. I don't have the patience for baking. When I decide to bake (which is rare) I want to bake now. I do not want to wait for my butter to soften.

[michiruwater]

I bought the Tassajara Bread Book 2 or so years ago. The instructions for making a loaf of bread were absolutely wonderful, and it turned out to be easy. Until I moved to China, I baked my own bread every weekend. I highly recommend the book.

Sourdough was harder. The loaf I made wasn't nearly as flavorful as I had hoped. I just didn't have the patience to let the starter really ferment the way it needed to