Why do baking recipes have unsalted butter in the list of ingredients but also include a pinch of salt? Why not use salted butter?
Nona, Bodorgan, Anglesey
As in life, the answer comes down to control, Nona. Baking, after all, is more science than art, with the slightest misstep – be that ingredient or temperature – having the ability to shake the very foundations your cakes and cookies were built on.
The official butter party line is always to use unsalted butter when baking, and Jeremy Lee is a fully paid-up member. “It wouldn’t even occur to me to do anything with salted butter other than spread it on bread or toast,” says the head chef of London’s Quo Vadis and master of puddings. “It has a fatty quality when cooked and brings an unsavoury quality to baking, which is hard to define; I just wouldn’t go there.’ Unsalted butter, Lee adds, is superior as it’s less tampered with: “If you know all the ingredients going into your baking, you will have absolute confidence.”
Essentially, using unsalted butter makes it less of a guessing game, allowing for Thomas Keller-like precision (he measures salt in millimetres, but I’m not suggesting you go that far). It’s also fresher (as it’s not destined for the long shelf life of salted) and sidesteps the issue of unknown quality and quantity of salt from across products (the difference can be considerable). As New York-based food writer and author of Nothing Fancy: The Art of Having People Over (out in October) Alison Roman says: “Five grams of salt is always going to be five grams of salt. I want to take out the variables, and salted butter is a variable.” Roman does, however, go to the salty side for shortbread and for her feted salted butter and chocolate chunk shortbread cookies (from her first book, Dining In), which sent Instagram and Twitter into wild fervour last year. So why the change? “A shortbread made with unsalted butter was good, but using a salted butter was just a little more savoury and definitely salty,” she says. “It’s like adding salt to your pasta water rather than just seasoning it at the end: you get a richer, funkier flavour.”
But salted butter won’t lead to broken baking dreams, according to Feast perfectionist Felicity Cloake: “To be honest, I use salted butter, because that’s what I keep at home – and I will quite often add a little more salt, too.” It makes less difference than you might imagine, unless you want to be very precise, she adds. “If you take a Victoria sponge or shortcrust pastry made with salted butter, the salt is not going to be the dominant flavour.” So it’s all a matter of what you’re comfortable with: “There would have to be a really good reason [for me to use unsalted butter]: if I’m testing a recipe and wanted the exact results of the writer, for example, or making a sauce.” As with most bakes, you can taste as you go, so if you do throw caution to the wind and go with salted butter, this is important. East London baker Lily Vanilli does add a word of caution in her book Sweet Tooth, noting that the water content in salted butter “plays a role in the toughening of gluten” and therefore alters the texture. So we’re back to flexing those control muscles.
Anna Berrill
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