Creaming Crystal Farms Butter and Sugar from 74 Degrees

I made a batch of butter cookies to wind up the most recent series of experiments, which has used Crystal Farms unsalted butter creamed with sugar for two minutes, with the flour mixed in for two minutes plus twenty seconds (twenty seconds with the first two cups, then two minutes with all four cups of flour). This experiment used butter that had been warmed to just over 74 degrees before creaming. The butter at that temperature was amazingly plastic!

I am presenting here the data for the whole series for comparison. Each set of four numbers is the results from warming butter to temperatures of 68.4, 70.2, 72.0, and 73.9 degrees respectively:

Starting Temperature:
68.4 - 70.2 - 72.0 - 73.9

Ending Temperature:
68.9 (change of 0.5) - 70.9 (change of 0.7) - 71.8 (change of -0.2) - 75.9 (change of 2.0)

Weight of one level cup of creamed butter/sugar, not including weight of cup:
200g - 204g - 214g - 203g

Percent volume increase during creaming:
28.0% - 26.5% - 20.6% - 27.1%

Weight of one level cup of dough after mixing, not including weight of cup:
247 - 239 - 241 - 226

Percent volume increase during creaming and mixing:
0% - 3.4% - 2.5% - 9.3%

The increase in volume during creaming was the same as at lower temperatures. From this data alone, it seems like maybe the lower increase in volume at 72 degrees may have been an exception, but I wouldn't know without doing the same thing a number of times. The volume increase during mixing was the most in this series of experiments, and I might have thought that would be a good sign, but see the next paragraph.

The key observation is that the cookies didn't come out very well. The cookies from the Wilton pan were quite flat indeed, and pitted. The cookies baked on the Williams-Sonoma Goldtouch Commercial Cookie Sheet were pretty flat as well, and even a few of them were pitted, which is very rare on the Goldtouch pan.

Thus, from this series of experiements, the only starting temperature that produced very good cookies was 72 F. At 70 they were too flat, and at 68 they were very badly pitted and even deformed. Above 72, the cookies are again too flat and pitted.

The cookies at 72 degrees showed small increase in volume through the mixing step, and showed the least volume increase of all during the creaming step. Having the lowest volume increase isn't really the key factor, though - cookies that are cremed for six minutes have a much higher volume increase than any here, and come out quite well.

That's all pretty interesting. I would say that with Crystal Farms butter, the procedure using two minutes of creaming is simply too touchy. It's not very practical to try to get the butter to a certain temperature within a degree one way or the other. I've been doing it all the time, but it is definitely no fun, and since the butter doesn't really "go back" to the correct state if it gets too warm but is then cooled again, trying to pursue a highly temperature-dependent recipe like this carries too big a risk of overheating the butter and being just plain out of luck.

But tonight I did precisely the same experiment, warming the butter to 74 degrees and creaming for two minutes, using Land o' Lakes butter - and the results were amazing. More tomorrow. Suffice it to say that my conclusion about the procedure here applies only to Crystal Farms butter.

If using Crystal Farms butter, you want to warm the butter to only around 68-70 degrees, and then cream for perhaps six minutes, or long enough to raise the temperature of the butter to around 71-72 degrees. That procedure makes great cookies using Crystal Farms butter. Nothing seems to work well with Weyauwega brand butter.