Butter - A Major Discovery!

Butter - A Major Discovery!

I did a ton of baking over the weekend. A friend asked me to bring cookies to a special event, and I made a double batch of butter cookies and actually baked all of them for a change. Wow, that was a job! The next morning my son was good enough to help frost them all. Good thing, or I wouldn't have had them done on time!

This was no time for major experiments - these cookies were supposed to come out well, so I used my best times to get good results, and sprang for butter I know gives a better taste - Crystal Farms Unsalted Butter.

What a difference! The taste was as I expected. What I didn't expect was the huge difference in the quality of cookies coming off the Wilton pan. If you've been reading along, you know that the Wilton pan has been consistently been giving overly flat cookies, most often in conjunction with overly large gas bubbles interfering with a nice chewing texture. They tend to come out a bit on the hard crunchy side. Not horribly so, but not remotely the way I'd choose to have them. When I bake on gentler pans, like an insulated baking sheet or the Williams-Sonoma Goldtouch Commercial Cookie Sheet, they come out gently crunchy, really beautifully well. I discovered that the difference between excellent cookies and so-so cookies on the Wilton pan, and probably any inexpensive non-stick baking sheet, is using suitable butter.

I've been using Weyauwega brand butter from Star Dairy in Wausau, because it's less expensive. When I used the Crystal Farms butter this weekend instead, there was not much difference between the cookies baked on the Wilton pan and the ones baked on the Williams-Sonoma pan! It was downright shocking!!!! The only difference I notice is that the cookies from the Wilton pan are a little flatter and denser. They spread just a bit more than the cookies from the Williams-Sonoma pan, and because they feel denser when I chew them, I conclude they didn't rise as high from the baking powder they contained.

Last week I baked cookies with egg yolks and egg whites, and those cookies didn't spread on the Wilton pan, either. They also had a nice texture. I thought the flavor from the eggs made a pretty obvious difference in the way the cookies tasted, though, and I feel so happy to have found that it simply is not necessary to add eggs to these cookies when I use the right butter, even when they are baked on inexpensive pans!

I did try one variation between the two big batches of dough I made up, though. I used 0.5 teaspoons of baking powder with one batch, and only 0.25 teaspoons of baking powder with the other. For the cookies baked on the Wilton pan, the cookies with less baking powder were slightly harder. For the cookies baked on the Goldtouch pan, I couldn't tell any difference between the 0.5 and 0.25 teaspoon cookies. The amount of hardness was more like the Wilton cookies with 0.25 teaspoons of baking powder even though the cookies from the Goldtouch pan were higher, which surprised me.

I still want to try less baking powder in the cookies baked on the Wilton pan using Weyauwega butter. However, it's obvious to me now that I shouldn't do any more experiments using Weyauwega butter when the cookies I'm making have high butter content like these butter cookies do. I think the Weyauwega brand butter is good butter and it really is less expensive, and there may be some cookies it works fine for, but I doubt it will ever work for butter cookies on inexpensive non-stick pans, unless the egg portions are added, in which case the cookies do come out OK.

I noticed something else interesting when I was making these cookies. I creamed the butter and sugar for six minutes and the volume really bulked up. But when I added the flour and beat for three minutes, the volume went way down again. I could see it happen as I turned the bowl - the dough got smaller and smaller, the longer I beat it. Obviously the flour was somehow removing the air I'd put into it with the creaming. I don't really have a way to measure how much of the air remained. One thing that seems worth trying is seeing what happens when I reduce the mixing time with this better butter. Two minutes of mixing wasn't quite enough for the Wilton pan before - the baked cookies were pitted. Is it enough with Crystal Farms butter? If it is, the cookies might be just a little less flat on the Wilton pan, which is a plus.

In looking around on the Internet, I see time and again people saying that Land o' Lakes butter is the best for baking. I tried it before Christmas and didn't really see any difference between it and Crystal Farms, except for a very subtle difference in flavor. I certainly need to try Land o' Lakes butter again with my best butter cookie procedure, though.

I have seen a couple of people say that Land o' Lakes Super Creamy butter is the best for cookies. I checked the Land o' Lakes Web site, and there is no Super Creamy butter listed there - they must not make it any more. They don't carry it where I shop, either. However, I saw that Crystal Farms makes a European Style butter which has slightly higher fat content, which was the supposed benefit of the Land o' Lakes Super Creamy butter as well. I need to give that a try. I happened to talk to a shopper at the store who mentioned another brand of European style butter that the store I've been shopping at didn't carry, but other local stores do. I'll have to try that as well.

A while ago, I started some experiments to measure how much air creaming brought into the butter. The six-minute time was way off. For all the batches I've made recently I creamed for six minutes, so I have a number I'm quite confident of for the six-minute creaming times. I'll report the final creaming results for Weyauwega butter in my next post.