http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/dining/17bake.html?_r=1

New York Times
December 17, 2008
Butter Holds the Secret to Cookies That Sing
By JULIA MOSKIN

WHEN home bakers get out the mixer and the decorating sugar at this
time of year, visions of perfect-edged cookies and shapely cakes dance
in their heads. But too often, the reality — both for the cookie and
the baker — is ragged, fallen, and fraying around the edges.

"I've cried many times at 2 a.m., when the cookies fall apart after
all that work," said Susan Abbott, a lawyer in Dallas who tries every
Christmas to reproduce her mother's flower-shaped lemon cookies,
though she rarely bakes during the rest of the year.

"It seems that home bakers don't always follow instructions
precisely," said Amy Scherber, the owner of Amy's Bread stores in
Manhattan (where she also makes cakes and cookies, including orange
butter cookies). "And then it's so disappointing when things don't
turn out."

The most common mistakes made by home bakers, professionals say, have
to do with the care and handling of one ingredient: butter. Creaming
butter correctly, keeping butter doughs cold, and starting with fresh,
good-tasting butter are vital details that professionals take for
granted, and home bakers often miss.

Butter is basically an emulsion of water in fat, with some dairy
solids that help hold them together. But food scientists, chefs and
dairy professionals stress butter's unique and sensitive nature the
way helicopter parents dote on a gifted child.

"Butter has that razor melting point," said Shirley O. Corriher, a
food scientist and author of the recently published "BakeWise: The
Hows and Whys of Successful Baking" (Scribner).

For mixing and creaming, butter should be about 65 degrees: cold to
the touch but warm enough to spread. Just three degrees warmer, at 68
degrees, it begins to melt.

"Once butter is melted, it's gone," said Jennifer McLagan, author of
the new book "Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With
Recipes" (Ten Speed Press).

Warm butter can be rechilled and refrozen, but once the butterfat gets
warm, the emulsion breaks, never to return.

For clean edges on cookies and for even baking, doughs and batters
should stay cold — place them in the freezer when the mixing bowl
seems to be warming up. And just before baking, cookies should be very
well chilled, or even frozen hard.

Cold butter's ability to hold air is vital to creating what pastry
chefs call structure — the framework of flour, butter, sugar, eggs and
leavening that makes up most baked goods.

Before Anita Chu began work on her just-published "Field Guide to
Cookies" (Quirk Books), she was a Berkeley-trained structural engineer
with a baking habit she couldn't shake. One of her favorite cookies is
the croq-télé, or TV snack, a chunky cookie she adapted from the Paris
pastry chef Arnaud Larher. "There is no leavening to lift it, no eggs
to hold it together," she said. "It's all about the butter." Ms. Chu's
experience in design helped her with the demanding precision of
pastry.

"Butter is like the concrete you use to pour the foundation of a
building," she said. "So it's very important to get it right: the
temperature, the texture, the aeration."

Ms. Chu says that butter should be creamed — beaten to soften it and
to incorporate air — for at least three minutes. "When you cream
butter, you're not just waiting for it to get soft, you're beating air
bubbles into it," Ms. Chu said. When sugar is added, it makes more air
pockets, she said.

And those air bubbles are all that cookies or cakes will get, Ms.
Corriher said. "Baking soda and baking powder can't make air bubbles,"
she said. "They only expand the ones that are already there."

The best way to get frozen or refrigerated butter ready for creaming
is to cut it into chunks. (Never use a microwave: it will melt it,
even though it will look solid.) When the butter is still cold, but
takes the imprint of a finger when gently pressed, it is ready to be
creamed.

When using a stand mixer, attach the paddle blade, and never go above
medium speed, or the butter will heat up.

Butter's structural abilities are most crucial in layered or
"laminated" pastries like puff pastry, strudel, croissants and pie
dough, where flour-coated globules of butter expand during baking,
creating flat layers of pastry bathed in melted butter.

The result is almost succulent, splintering into flakes and shards
with each bite. Alvin Lee, the owner of Lee Lee's Baked Goods in
Harlem, may be one of the last commercial bakers in New York producing
traditional butter-dough rugelach, the Austrian-German-Jewish cookies
that are like tiny strudels. Most rugelach are made with vegetable
shortening, which is much cheaper and longer-lasting. Shortening
behaves well at most temperatures and makes crumbly, tender doughs,
but has no flavor of its own. Mr. Lee's rugelach are buttery,
magnificent, and fleeting. He says he came out of retirement, after a
30-year professional baking stint, determined to master the rugelach
genre. "I couldn't find one that I wanted to eat, with all the old
Jewish and German bakeries closing," he said. "So I had to make them
myself."

As commercial baking moves away from butter, home cooks have more
choices. There are regional French butters with impeccable government
credentials, English butter from Jersey cows, yellow butter from
Alpine peaks and white butter from Emilia-Romagna. (European Union
export subsidies are one reason for the cornucopia.)

Standard American butter, usually made from fresh cream, is about 80
percent fat. European butters are about 82 percent, and made from
slightly fermented cream. (American butters in that style, fashionable
among food lovers, are often called "cultured.")

Salted butter was long disparaged by American epicures, but the
French, the global butter authorities, welcome salt. "Salt makes food
taste better," said Robert Bradley, emeritus professor of dairy
science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. "Why not butter?"

Blind tastings by Dining section staff members and others found the
differences among butters, European and American, to be pronounced.
Some were waxy, some nutty, some grassy. Some seemed less greasy than
others. Professionals like Mr. Bradley can taste many other flavor
undertones in butter, some lovely and some not, including grass,
flowers, whey, old cream, malt, must and weed. Some flavor differences
come from cows' feed. Others are acquired during processing.

Overall, the European-style butters have more of a golden, warm,
toasty flavor. (This is from a compound called diacetyl that develops
during fermentation.) Standard American butter has a fresher flavor of
milk and cream.

But quality was unpredictable. The butter with the best credentials
(high in fat, from the cows used to make Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese),
and the one with the most alluring packaging, were the most
flavorless.

Our favorite butters were salted Kerrygold from Ireland, unsalted
Kate's Homemade Butter from Old Orchard Beach, Me., and a "limited
edition" cultured butter from Organic Valley, made from May to
September, when cows are outside at least part of the time, eating
grass rather than feed. Butter from grass-fed cows, rich in beta
carotene, is more yellow (not higher in butterfat, as many believe).

In baking, the flavor differences mostly disappear. High-fat butters
can be used in traditional recipes. "You shouldn't see much
difference," said Kim Anderson, director of the Pillsbury test
kitchen, "maybe a slightly richer flavor and more tender crumb."

Most important is that butter be well preserved. Mr. Bradley
recommends wrapping butter that's not going to be used immediately in
foil, then sealing the edges with tape. Or using it quickly.

"I just went out and bought eight pounds of butter," said Robin Olson,
"and it will all be gone by next weekend." Ms. Olson, of Gaithersburg,
Md., is making six dozen cookies this week and reigns as queen of the
Christmas cookie party at her Web site, cookie-exchange.com. Her
instructions for cookie swaps are widely adopted. She always calls for
butter.

"I can tell a margarine cookie as soon as I bite into it," she said.
"And then I put it right down."


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/dining/17bake.html