Warmed Butter Does Not Cream After Cooling

Things have been moving slowly on the cookie front this week. I didn't do any baking last weekend. On Tuesday, St. Patrick's Eve so to speak, I tried an experiment with two minutes' creaming and two minutes' mixing. It didn't get very far, because something untoward happened.

I took the butter out in the morning. It was a nice day, warm outside, and when I got home after work and checked the temperature of the butter, it was 75. Much too warm for the experiment. I cooled the butter down to 68.9 and creamed it with the sugar. It didn't seem to behave well. When I was done I weighed it, and a level cup of the creamed butter and sugar was 272 grams. Well, so what? But I checked that against the last time I creamed Crystal Farms butter for two minutes. I posted that on January 31, 2010, and recorded a weight of only 228 grams after 2 minutes creaming. The difference between 272 and 228 grams is huge. I wasn't sure what was wrong. I noticed something else, too - it was 68.9 degrees when I started, but about 73 degrees when I finished, e.g. the temperature went up over three degrees in two minutes of creaming. Huh? I messed around with the butter a lot trying to get it to around 69 degrees, and I figured I'd done something to it. I didn't even proceed.

Today I set the butter out in the morning again, and again it was 75 degrees when I came home. Guess I can't do that any more, now that it's warm out. Well, this time I got it to 68.7 degrees without much trouble. After two minutes of creaming, the weight was 281 grams, even more than before, and the temperature again had gone up around three degrees.

Well, that's very interesting. I don't think I like it much, though. First of all, to continue to get comparable results to what I've been doing, I apparently have to take the butter out when I get home. I suppose the good news is that, if the room temperature is 75, then maybe it will really only take an hour to get to 68+ degrees, like all the books say it should. Tomorrow I'll do that and find out for sure.

The other thing is, it sure shows you have to be careful with the temperature if creaming the butter with sugar is part of the recipe! (Maybe). The point of creaming is to whip air into the butter. If the amount of air whipped in varies tremendously, it could obviously affect the results. And as far as I'm concerned, messing about with the temperature of the butter is MOST annoying.

Anyway, today I said "Heck with it, might as well make the cookies." So I proceeded to mix in the flour as usual and baked the cookies. The weight of one level cup of the dough after adding the flour and mixing was 287 grams. Compare that to the results I posted on March 14. It's a few grams more than the 275-281 gram weights in those mixing experiment, which were all after six minutes of creaming. In other words, the extra four minutes of creaming did seem to result in slightly more air being incorporated into the butter than with my two minutes of creaming today.

I finished baking the cookies, and although I haven't done a direct taste test comparison, I don't see that the cookies are really different from the ones I made with six minutes of creaming.

Because of the 75-degree starting temperature of the butter, I don't think I can use this experiment as a direct comparison. That high temperature simply introduces too large a change to the procedure. I'll need to do it a third time tomorrow, with butter that simply comes up to 68-69 degrees and is then creamed, without having going through the 75-degree stage. I want to see whether adding flour to butter that is creamed less than six minutes reduces the volume to exactly the same amount as with six minutes, or to a smaller volume. I can't really get the answer if the shorter creaming time leaves the butter with too little air in it to lose much when the flour is added, like what happened today.

So much for my experiment tonight!