It’s All About the Butter!
Julia Childs is famous for having said in the unmistakeable voice of hers, “Fat tastes good!” That is so true and truer still is the undeniable fact “Butter tastes good!” Your Two Chums love our butter 🙂
Yet in the second half of the twentieth century, butter – one of the great flavors and most important ingredients in a cook’s repertoire – was reported to be the gateway to a host of health problems. We now know that butter’s negative reputation was undeserved, and instead that butter substitutes and manmade trans fats are the true culprits that pose threats to our health.
Indeed, recent studies reveal just how important butter is to a healthy diet. It supplies our bodies with vitamins and minerals; boosts our immune system; helps hormone production; and supports our bones, organs, and most importantly, our brain. Good natural butter is satisfying and can even help with maintaining a healthy weight.
The bottom line? Get out your mixing bowl or saucepan, roll up your sleeves, and embrace the joys of cooking with butter, and savor its unique, irreplaceable taste.*
There are so many delectable foods whose flavor and texture depend on butter. There’s buttercream icing, mashed potatoes, croissant, bearnaise sauce, shortbread cookies, Texas chocolate sheetcake, biscuits, cinnamon rolls, pie crust, and caramel corn, to name just a few.
Last week we told you we would be giving you a different cookie recipe each week leading up to the holidays. This week we would like to give you one of our favorite butter cookie recipes…Snickerdoodles.
Snickerdoodles
1 cup butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 large eggs
2 3/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons sugar
3 teaspoons cinnamon
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Mix butter, 1 1/2 cups sugar and eggs thoroughly in a large bowl.
Combine flour, baking soda and salt in a separate bowl.
Blend dry ingredients into butter mixture.
Chill dough for about 10-15 minutes in the fridge.
Meanwhile, mix 3 tablespoons sugar, and 3 teaspoons cinnamon in a small bowl.
Scoop up 1 inch pieces of dough.
Roll the dough into balls and place the balls in the sugar/ cinnamon mixture. Coat by gently rolling balls of dough in the sugar mixture.
Place on n ungreased cookie sheet, and bake 10 minutes exactly. Remove from the oven and allow cookies to sit on cookie sheet for 1 minute.
Remove from pan immediately and cool on a wire rack. Cookies may seem too soft and underdone at first but they continue cooking even after they come out of the oven. Do not overcook. Cookies will firm up as they cool.
As you can see these are easy to make, use ingredients you more than likely always have on hand and are buttery and delicious. Be careful. They are addictive and are bound to become one of your favorite cookies too 🙂
* an excerpt from Butter Through the Ages
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Comments are closed.
I agree, I work in a bakery, an Amish bakery, DasEssenhaus in Middlebury Indiana. Shortening and butter are two key components in baking. I don’t care for margarine, although we use it in our baking too.
Love hearing from you, Paul. What fun you must have, working in a bakery!
Butter is my favorite food.
My mother loved it, too; as a little girl, she’d sneak into the dining room and steal it from dinner party tables.
Hi Jackie and Robin,
I have a question for you two lovely butter queens ;)… In your experiences (the many) is there a better butter brand to use for baking? Sometimes the butter I am using in my general cooking seems fine until I go to bake something. My success – or lack of 😉 – in some of my baking recipes seems to come down to the butter I am using when I rule out other variances, I.e trying to keep the brands of my ingredients consistent, etc. I do use trader joes butter & Altadena, & generally any butter on sale….It just depends where I am shopping. Like robin mentioned in the video, butters can be so different from each other in flavor, etc.,
Thanks so much TwoChums!!
Linda
Linda a very good question. Other than the taste issue, the other variance in butter is the fat content. We think of butter as all fat but it has a water content too so the higher the fat content the less water there is. The higher fat content butter is great for baking. Using it in pie crust for example means your crust will be flakier. This is why some cooks only use lard in their pie crust because it is all fat and they know the crust will be short and flaky.
I tend to use Costco’s butter just because it is consistent and I can count on it and it is very affordable…usually about $2.50 per pound. But I do really like the organic butter that you can buy at Trader Joes as well. I think the most important thing is probably that whatever butter you choose ( and it could actually be any of them) you buy enough to keep some in the freezer so you are consistently using the same butter in your baking. You will learn how that particular butter “acts” in your baking and can make adjustments as needed. Hope this helps ….keep the questions coming. 🙂
Loved the video, Chums!!