Just discovered butter temperature matters way more than I thought

I was reading a King Arthur Flour blog post last night and found out that if your butter is even 2 degrees off, your cookies will spread completely different. Has anyone else spent years guessing on this and only now realizing why their bake comes out flat?

2 comments

2 Comments

sethc123d ago

My buddy Tom spent three years making cookies for his kids' bake sales and they always came out like pancakes. He was using butter straight out of the fridge, cold and hard, thinking it was fine. One day his wife left the butter on the counter for an hour before he started mixing and his cookies came out thick and chewy for the first time. He called me all excited saying it was a total game changer and now he gets mad when the butter isn't room temp. The difference between cold and softened butter is basically the difference between a flat disc and a proper cookie.

johnson.ryan3d ago

Is it just me or does your buddy Tom sound like a guy who also keeps his butter in the freezer section of his fridge? My friend Mark did the exact same thing for almost two years, @sethc12. He was convinced cold butter made denser cookies or something. Then he watched his sister leave the butter out for like 45 minutes and her cookies puffed up perfectly. Now he literally preheats his oven and then leaves the butter on the stove while the oven warms up. He told me it feels like he's wasting time, but the cookies finally don't look like hockey pucks. He even bought one of those little butter keepers for the counter so it's always ready to go.