The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Men

The best-laid plans of mice and men hae aft agley gegangen - yet again. (Oops, Scottish, not German! But I never learned my Scottish declensions.)

I thought I had my next set of experiments all nicely laid out. I'd come home every day, take the butter from the refrigerator, wait for it to warm to 68 degrees, then go to it. Nope! How long does it take for butter to warm to room temperature, again? 30 minutes? 45 minutes? Baloney! After two hours and fifteen minutes on the table, unwrapped, the butter had warmed from 40 degrees to 64.7 degrees. In the last fifteen minutes, it went from 64 to 64.7 degrees. How long would it have taken to warm to 68 degrees? Another two hours?

I thought, "OK, it's 64.7 degrees, let's just go with it." Bad idea. It was too cold to cream. It barely spread in the bowl and didn't want to take sugar in very well. I wanted to cream for one minute and measure volume increase, but after one minute it was still basically solid butter because it wasn't warm enough. If I was "just making cookies" I'd just beat the heck out of it for a while and after several minutes it would warm up and be usable, but it's not at all what I want to do every time and so there is no point in collecting data every day on what happens when I do that. Bummer.

Obviously people who expect butter to warm to 68 degrees in 30-45 minutes don't live in the Midwest with winter room temperatures around 68 degrees! I can't say anything about how long it takes to warm up when the actual room temperature is 75 degrees or warmer, but it sure takes a heck of a long time if it's 70 degrees or colder in your kitchen!

So, back to the drawing board for tomorrow.

I don't really like leaving the butter out overnight. I'm using unsalted butter, and it develops a slight off odor very easily. The salt in salted butter is an antimicrobial agent and helps keep it fresh longer, but unsalted butter is kind of delicate. One night out probably doesn't really hurt, but then I go to work and don't get to it until the next evening. I can't really remember to take it out in the morning, or that would work. But I forget! Anyway, sometimes the butter left out overnight is 69 when I go to use it, sometimes 72 or 73. If the sun shines on it in the morning it may get kind of melty, and that changes its properties a bit. And if I don't get to my experiment in the evening like I planned, then it's another 24 hours. Just not the best plan in these circumstances.

But I want to be able to make my cookies after work, without having to wait four hours for the butter to warm enough to start the recipe!

Grating the butter like I mentioned on January 18, 2010, would work great if all I wanted was to get the butter warmed up faster, but I also need to control what is happening so I can collect data and learn to do things reproducibly. I'll never be able to control the temperature of the butter if I grate it - how do you even measure the temperature of grated butter before you start to mix it?

I think what I need to do is take the butter from the fridge when I get home, but immediately cut it into half-inch chunks and put them in the bowl. That should speed up how fast it warms up considerably, and I think I can measure the temperature without too much trouble. I hope! I'll find out tomorrow.