Butter’s Role in Baking Bread: 3 Tips for Using Butter in Baking

Butter is a water-in-fat emulsion, a network of tiny droplets of water molecules suspended in a network of fat globules, with a small number of milk solids that are sometimes called curds.

When agitated or churned, fresh cream separates into liquid (buttermilk) and solids (butterfat). The butterfat is then pressed and kneaded into a semi-firm, spreadable product known as butter, which bakers use to enrich the dough for baked goods such as cakes, cookies, breads, muffins, pastries, and scones.

Butter plays a few key roles in the baking process:

• Flavor: Butter can impart an array of flavors into bread, from a faint, grassy sweetness to a nutty, caramelized warmth. These flavors largely depend on where the butter was sourced.
• Texture: The calling card for good butter is a high fat content, which translates into a rich, moist crumb when used to bake chocolate chip cookies, pound cakes, and breads.
• Structure: Butter contains water, which transforms into steam in the heat of an oven. That steam expands while remaining trapped in the structure maintained by gluten strands, creating an airy crumb and stretchy flakiness in laminated doughs like croissants, pie crusts, and puff pastry.

While you can use most butter interchangeably, there are a few important distinctions:

1. 1. Unsalted sweet cream: In the United States, sweet cream butter—butter made from pasteurized fresh cream—is available in three grades: AA, A, and B, concerning texture, flavor, and quality in descending order. Unsalted butter is a staple ingredient in many baking recipes because it allows bakers to control the salt content.
2. 2. Salted sweet cream: As its name suggests, salted butter contains added salt, usually about ¼ teaspoon per stick. While salted butter is delicious as a spread for toast and bagels, using it in baking can be challenging because of its sodium content, which can result in salty baked goods if your measurements are not precise. Additionally, salt is a preservative that extends the shelf life of salted butter—when purchasing it in the grocery store, it may not be as fresh as its unsalted counterpart.
3. 3. Cultured: Like yogurt, cultured butter contains live bacteria that release lactic acid and aromatic compounds, giving it a tangy, slightly funky flavor. Cultured butter is a stylistic remnant of a time before factory-made, commercial butter, when multiple days’ worth of milk would be combined before churning, increasing the likelihood of natural fermentation in the batch.
4. 4. European-style: European-style butter is richer and softer than its American counterparts due to its higher milk fat content. The average milk fat content of European-style butter is between 82 to 86 percent, while standard butters are 80 percent fat in the US. In France, butter must legally contain a minimum fat content of 82 percent.

Breads with soft, easy-to-tear textures that melt in the mouth are often chock full of butter. Here are some of the best examples of enriched breads:

1. 1. Brioche: Rich brioche is a boulangerie staple—one of the few products you’ll find in both French bakeries and patisseries. This sweet bread is made with 100 percent white flour, eggs, butter, and a little sugar, requiring extended periods of gentle kneading due to its high-fat content. It’s worth the effort—the result is a rich and airy bread with a tight crumb perfect for dunking in hot chocolate.
2. 2. Bublik: The precursor to the bagel, bublik is a leavened Polish bread shaped into a ring and boiled. It typically features egg, milk, and butter in its dough.
3. 3. Cornbread: A golden brown, sweet quickbread made with cornmeal and melted butter.
4. 4. Corn pone: Corn pone, also known as Indian pone, is a type of cornbread made from a thick cornmeal dough that lacks eggs and milk. It is cooked in an iron pan over an open fire using butter, shortening, or cooking oil.
5. 5. Pain de mie: Pain de mie, French for “bread of crumb,” is a fluffy white bread that’s light on crust. The sandwich bread recipe features commercial yeast that creates a mild flavor and uniform texture, with milk and butter added for richness. Pain de mie is an ideal sandwich bread that makes a great base for pain perdu (French toast) or croutons.
6. 6. Roti bolen: A cross between a fluffy Hawaiian roll and a flaky croissant, Indonesian roti bolen features buttery layers stuffed with cheese and fruit like banana or durian.
7. 7. White breads: Pillowy soft white sandwich breads include a little butter for texture and a hint of sweetness.

When it comes to baking bread, determining the best butter for the job depends on what you’re making. Here are a few general tips for using butter in the bread-baking process:

1. 1. Use high fat butter for enriched recipes. For some enriched bread recipes, butter with a high-fat concentration is preferable—like an unsalted European-style butter—since it’s less likely to break up during kneading. (In baked goods like scones, a higher water content brings the bread to life: Water molecules are part of what gives the scone its lift and craggy air pockets.)
2. 2. Reduce salt in recipe when using salted butter. If you only have salted butter on hand and want to bake a loaf of pain de mie to make sandwiches, cut the amount of salt in the recipe by half to avoid a salty loaf.
3. 3. Incorporate butter last for rich bread recipes. When making brioche and other rich breads, add the butter last. Fat bonds to gluten proteins, preventing them from bonding to each other, so adding it later gives the gluten network a chance to develop, ensuring the structure of the final product.

While you can replace butter with other solid fats, it won’t garner the same results. However, if you don’t have butter on hand, there are a few common substitutions that can work:

1. 1. Margarine: The most common substitution for butter is margarine, a combination of refined vegetable oil and water with the same fat ratio to water content as traditional butter. Margarine is not as flavorful as butter
2. 2. Shortening: Shortening refers to any fat that remains solid at room temperature, such as lard or vegetable-oil based shortenings. These are generally 100 percent hydrogenated fat that don’t contain water or discernible flavor. Shortening traps air bubbles in batter or dough, leading to a higher rise.
   
3. 3. Olive oil: Many breads, such as focaccia, use olive oil as their primary fat. It is generally acceptable to substitute ¾ tablespoon olive oil for every tablespoon of butter in bread baking.

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