If you come into contact with baking, you will always use one ingredient, that is butter. When you go to the dairy refrigerator in the supermarket, you will see butter. Yes, butter is an oil that needs to be refrigerated. We usually go to the Cantonese restaurant for dinner, and there is a famous snack, which is pineapple butter steamed stuffed bun. Cut the freshly baked pineapple bag horizontally, put a piece of butter in it, and it melts in the mouth. It's super delicious. When foreigners eat bread, besides jam, they also like to spread butter before eating.
This is just the most basic way to eat butter. In fact, butter is more useful for baking cakes. Baking Margaret cookies and cranberry cookies requires a lot of butter. The baked cookies are very fragrant and delicious. Mother Dou is going to tell you about butter today. Butter is divided into animal butter and vegetable butter. Let's see the difference.
Animal butter
Butter is oil extracted from milk, so it is animal butter, which contains 80% fat and the rest is water and other ingredients. The smell of animal butter is the natural smell of milk. Although it tastes delicious when solidified, softened animal butter tastes more fragrant and thicker. Animal butter needs to be stored in cold storage, because it will gradually transform at high temperature, and even completely melt into liquid butter when the temperature is too high.
vegetable fat
Vegetable butter, also known as margarine, is a "fake butter" made of vegetable oil through artificial processing. There is also a little aroma, but the taste is not as fragrant as animal butter. Pastry made of vegetable butter is very suitable for storage and transportation, but it is not particularly delicious because vegetable butter is not easy to solidify at low temperature and not easy to dissolve at high temperature. Moreover, vegetable butter has also been proved to contain some unhealthy ingredients and is not suitable for long-term consumption. So as far as butter is concerned, western pastry shops still like to use animal butter, which is delicious and healthy.
Salt-free butter and salt butter
Butter is divided into salted butter and unsalted butter according to whether salt is added or not. Usually, the butter used for baking is salt-free butter, which is more suitable for baking and cooking because it retains its original natural fragrance and light taste. However, the salt content of salted butter is about 1.5%, the content of emulsifiable concentrate is relatively small, and the taste is slightly salty, so it is more suitable for making hamburgers with bread.
Why is butter so expensive?
When you go to the supermarket to buy butter, you will find that a small piece costs tens of dollars, and no matter what brand of butter is a bit expensive. This is because both animal butter and vegetable butter are very complicated, and the transformation from raw materials to butter requires many processes. A large number of raw materials can only produce a small amount of butter, plus the cost of storage and transportation, the price is naturally expensive.
Although butter is expensive, it is an indispensable ingredient for baking. Even if it is expensive, you should buy it. But in some baking recipes, butter can be replaced by corn oil, but the aroma will be much weaker.