There’s Just No Substitute for Butter
Dear Corduroy,
I am working with a cookie recipe that calls for 1 cup shortening and 1 cup butter. I don’t have shortening, but I do have margarine. I’ve heard margarine has lower fat content and more water than shortening, but I’ve also heard it’s ok to substitute margarine for shortening. What do you recommend?
–Short-stuff
Dear Shorty:
I recommend you ignore the recipe’s suggestion to use half shortening and use nothing but butter. If it’s a sugar cookie recipe, that will make it a bit harder to roll out and cut successfully, but the upside would be much better flavor.
If you’re wedded to the idea of using a substitute fat, margarine is somewhat better than shortening, i suppose, because at least it has flavor. Though, the flavoring used in margarine are typically the same as is used in microwave popcorn; and that flavoring additive has been implicated in lung disease in workers at popcorn factories (read this for more info).
An interesting side note on margarine: though we think of it as a vegan option, when first introduced, margarine was decidedly not vegan or even vegetarian. It was made from cooking cow udders down with beef fat to produce a butter-like flavor out of pieces of the animal that would otherwise have been discarded.
December 19th, 2008 at 12:01 am
While I concur with your sentiments regarding butter (it’s so yum yum yummy), there is a difference in using butter and shortening. Butter has a lower melting point than butter. That means that butter will melt more before the cookie has a chance to set, thus the cookie will be flatter, chewier and less cakey. Starting with melted butter will be even more so (think brownies). All that said, if you substitute one type of fat for another, the cookies will still be tasty. They just may not be exactly the right consistency.
Alton Brown covers this extensively in Three Chips for Sister Marsha.
http://www.foodnetwork.com/good-eats/three-chips-for-sister-marsha/index.html
December 19th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
The butter flavor compound is diacetyl, and it has been linked to lung disease in some workers, but it’s in real butter too.
December 23rd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
The difference there is that the diacetyl in real butter hasn’t been added–it’s naturally occurring, and in low concentrations. In artificial butter substitutes, the diacetyl has been manufactured and added to simulate synthetically the sensation of eating real butter. Natural foods will always trump substitutes in my book.
May 21st, 2009 at 12:12 am
Tensai is right. If you use all butter you’ll get more concentrated butter flavor but you won’t get the right texture. There’s a method in that madness.