Effect of Mixing Times with Crystal Farms Butter I

I have been busy last week with a set of experiments on mixing flour into the cookie dough. The impetus for these experiments was that I saw the volume of the cookie dough was greatly reduced as the flour was mixed in. The creaming of butter with sugar really expanded the volume in the bowl, and then adding the flour seemed to drop it back down. I wanted to get some real indications of how much the volume was changing.

I made batches of butter cookies and, except for one of the batches, did everything the same except for varying the mixing time. I mixed the flour into the dough for 1 minute, 1.5 minutes, 2 minutes, 2.5 minutes, and 3 minutes. Three minutes of mixing flour with the creamed butter was the amount of time I found made reasonable cookies on the Wilton EverGlide pans using Weyauwega brand butter.

I was also curious whether the mixing time could be reduced if the cookies are made with Crystal Farms brand butter, since the overall quality of the cookies is so much improved with that brand and various texture problems simply go away.

I think the results are pretty interesting. They show that almost all the air is removed from the dough almost immediately, definitely by the time the dough is reasonably well mixed. That makes me wonder what the real purpose of creaming butter and sugar is. I imagine that smaller amounts of flour would reduce the volume less, but cookies do have a good amount of flour. Maybe it matters more for other kinds of cookies, but the effect of increasing the volume during creaming seems to have no effect on the baking results of these cookies.

Now, there is another hypothesis – maybe the main effect of creaming isn’t so much in the air left in the cookie dough when they are baked, but in how well the flour gets coated with butter. Maybe the coating goes better when the butter is fluffier. I’ll do some other mixing experiments with less creaming to see how that works out.

Anyway, here is the data. For each mixing time, the measurements are:

Temperature start of creaming
Temperature end of six minutes of creaming
Weight of level cup of creamed butter and sugar (including the cup)
Weight of level cup of dough with flour (including the cup)

1 minute
70.1 – 71.9 – 230g – 269g
1.5 minutes
68.3 – 70.8 – 225g – 280g
2 minutes
69.6 – 70.8 – 228g – 275g
2.5 minutes
69.5 – 71.0 – 234g – 281g
3 minutes
69.3 – 70.8 – 227g – 281g

I didn’t mix the flour in for the 1-minute time the same way as I did for the others. I saw with the 1.5-minute mixing time that the dough didn’t want to hang together very well – there were big gobs with one consistency and big globs with a slightly different consistency, and when I made the rolls of dough for refrigeration the rolls were almost in sections. Obviously not good. It was due to inadequate mixing with only 1.5 minutes of time. I figured it would be even worse with only 1 minute, so for the 1-minute experiment I added the flour in gradually over the minutes’ time, tablespoon by tablespoon, madly tossing it in from the 4-cup measuring cup I had it in, but bit by bit. Usually I dump two cups in, mix for 20 seconds, then dump the rest in, and mix for the measured amount of time (and so the “3 minutes” time is actually 3 minutes and 20 seconds, for example). The dough for the 1-minute time didn’t actually wind up mixed any better, and the cookies came out very poorly indeed. Apparently 1 minute of mixing is a viable mixing time at all.

I don’t think there’s much to gain from the temperature measurements – I just took them out of habit. The interesting information comes from the weight measurements.

Remember that the weight of 1 cup of butter and sugar before creaming at all is 312g (including the weight of the cup), and the weight of one cup of flour, butter and sugar in the recipe proportions but without any air (and including the weight of the cup) is 297g. From those numbers, I can calculate what percentage the volume increases due to air in the dough. All the experiments cream the butter for 6 minutes. The volume increases during creaming due to air were:

46.6%
50.1%
48.2%
43.3%
49.2%

It’s interesting to compare these increases using Crystal Farms butter with the increase with Weyauwega brand butter. For Weyauwega brand, the average volume increase for 6 minutes of creaming, using 2 cups of butter and 405 grams of C&H granulated sugar, was 47.7% +- 2.47%.

For Crystal Farms butter, the average volume increase for 6 minutes of creaming was 47.5% +- 2.68%.

In other words, the effect of creaming on volume using Crystal Farms and Weyauwega brand butters is essentially identical.

Now look at the volume increase after the flour is added (compared to when no air is present), for various mixing times:


1 minute
13.0%
1.5 minutes
7.5%
2 minutes
10.0%
2.5 minutes
7.1%
3 minutes
7.1%

These aren’t numbers to average, so there is some variation from the “true” means of the measurements. But you can see that the greatest amount of air is present after one minute of mixing, and it drops to about half that very quickly. The amount of air after 0 minutes might be close to the 47% at the end of creaming. You can see the numbers go down very quickly after adding the flour, and when I am mixing I see it happen visually.

I have baked the cookies, of course, and have photos, which are interesting. I’ll post them tomorrow.