Using browned butter in baking

February 17, 2018 8:14 AM

As I understand things, once butter has been melted it's no longer suitable for recipes that call for creaming butter with sugar—even after the butter has cooled and resolidified—due to chemical changes that occur in the process of melting. Have I discovered an exception to an otherwise sound rule or is this just a myth with no basis in science?

A few months ago I discovered this recipe for chocolate chip cookies that calls for browned butter, which is added to thoroughly mixed egg and white sugar after it has cooled, but while still liquid. The recipe is otherwise almost identical to the Tollhouse recipe, which begins with creaming butter with sugar. The outcome, however, is so much better that I would like to try using browned butter in other recipes.

Any thoughts/guidelines regarding when browned butter can/can't be used in place of solid butter?

posted by she's not there to Food & Drink (10 answers total)

Personally, I've never heard of any reason you can't cream cooled brown butter. The resultant brown butter will have somewhat higher fat content (due to some of the water in the butter evaporating during the browning) similar to ghee. You may need to add a bit of water/egg to avoid overly dry cookies if the recipe isn't created for brown butter.

At least Mark Bittman seems to agree with us - "Obviously brown butter can be swapped for all or a portion of melted butter in any recipe. It can also be subbed for all or some oil in moist baked goods like quick breads" - and that's good enough for me.
posted by saeculorum at 8:24 AM on February 17, 2018

I don't think you've found an exception--as you've discovered yourself, the end result is not the same when you use melted butter vs solid butter. The point of a "rule" like you can't use melted butter if you're creaming solid butter for a cake is that if you do, it won't turn out the same as the cake the recipe is written for, and if you want to make the cookies the toll house recipe is for, you won't get the same cookies if you use melted butter. It just happens that in this case you prefer the outcome of the melted butter cookies, but they're different recipes.

Have you read the the reasoning behind using melted brown butter in that recipe? It explains what's happening by using different types of butter. Maybe that will help you apply when to use brown butter in other recipes.
posted by Polychrome at 8:30 AM on February 17, 2018

My understanding is that butter is a kind of crystal, and that melting and re-solidifying will destroy that property of the butter. That's why chocolate is so fiddly to temper --- there's a couple different crystal structures the fat in the cocoa can form, and only one of them gives you smooth shiny chocolate, the other are dull or worse yet grainy. So there may be a few persnickety recipes where melting and re-solidifying the butter would affect the final texture -- maybe a delicate crumbly shortbread or gingersnap?

But I'd say the fact of it having been melted will have far less impact than the loss of water in the browning process and the loss of air -- whipped, "spreadable" butter obviously has tons of air whipped in, but even stick butter has some. But basically I'd say add a tsp or two of water and maybe give it a few extra turns when creaming and you should be good to go.
posted by Diablevert at 8:45 AM on February 17, 2018

It's not that you _can't_ use melted- and resolidified- butter; it's that the resulting structure will be different. Creaming solid butter with sugar and eggs creates a particular kind of structure (the sugar simultaneously whips the eggs and butter up to trap air; and the water in the butter melts the sugar a bit.) Previously melted butter has no water in it, its proteins are denatured due to the heat, its fat is in a different shape now, and it will function a bit differently.

If you're making serious cakes or brioche where the particular rise and crumb is important, I wouldn't try melted butter, except to experiment with. But for anything else, it'll be fine, if you add a little water back in to compensate for the water lost in browning. Even quickbreads should work, but the result might be a little denser than a creamed butter version would be.
posted by fingersandtoes at 9:36 AM on February 17, 2018

Just to add to the chorus, here are some apposite quotes from Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking:

The structure of butter... is above 80% milk fat and 15% water. The fat globules, solid crystals, and water droplets are embedded in a continuous mass of semi-solid "free" fat that coats them all. ...

Beurre noisette and beurre noir, "hazel" and "black" butter are melted butter sauces... Their flavor is depend by heating the butter to about 250°F/120°C until its water boils off and the molecules in the white residue, milk sugar and protein, react with each other to form brown pigments and new aromas.

Given that the browning process eliminates a small amount of water from the dough, I would be concerned that a baked good using browned butter would end up being denser than expected; while most of the leavening in cookies and cakes comes from a chemical rising agent or from air added to the batter, some small amount is due to the water in the batter turning into steam and expanding as it bakes. It's probably nothing you couldn't compensate for in principle; you'd just need to experiment.

I will happily accept all of your failed baking experiments in my mouth
posted by Johnny Assay at 10:32 AM on February 17, 2018

I’d try it - I know I’ve seen a recipe recently where browning/cooling/creaming was done but I can’t find it. You did have to add 2 Tbs liquid back per stick to compensate for moisture loss during browning (the writer had weighed the butter before and after). I suspect it’d still work but as in the Serious Eats cookies, sugars and eggs might need tweaking to get the result you want.
posted by OneSmartMonkey at 1:03 PM on February 17, 2018

I've made this Smitten Kitchen recipe a few times. She does have you cream the butter and brown sugar together, the dough is definitely harder to work with than traditional shortbreads but I keep coming back to it because it's...really really delicious.
posted by SoftRain at 1:26 PM on February 17, 2018

The author of your referenced recipes has been on a big browned butter kick lately. You should check out other recipes/articles she has published recently to get some other ideas on how to use brown butter.
posted by mmascolino at 2:24 PM on February 17, 2018

Slight texture change, yes. If you haven’t made brown butter frosting yet, you probably should. I’ve put this on coconut cupcakes, gingerbread cookies, and it’s amazing. It also shows how the structure of melted and cooled butter changes the creaming process, which you can use to your advantage when adapting other recipes.
posted by ananci at 3:46 PM on February 17, 2018

Since posting the question, I've had company/a reason to bake, and I've used browned butter in a coffee cake and rolled/cut sugar cookies. Although some comments mention a possible change in texture, that wasn't the case for these recipes*. The flavor of browned butter was prominent in both, which I thought detracted from the coffee cake. But it improved the cookies (frankly, I'm not a fan of sugar cookies—too bland/boring—I bake them because they're traditions and fun to decorate).

In contrast, the flavor isn't really pronounced in the chocolate chip cookies**. Browning the butter simply enhances the flavor. Had a similar effect in the family brownie recipe, which begins with melted butter.

*Worth noting—I don't precisely measure ingredients, e.g., when adding liquids I'll adjust amounts on the fly until the texture is right. Perhaps the texture would have been different if i had followed the recipe exactly.

**If you try the linked chocolate chip cookie recipe, I recommend tasting the cookies before adding the post-baking salt. I think the extra salt (compared to Toll House) in the recipe nicely enhances the flavor, but I ended up trying to brush off that extra salt.

Thanks to all—I appreciate the information. Iirc, it was a jr high home ec teacher who said resolidified melted butter was not suitable for recipes that called for creamed butter, so I've held on to that misinformation for 50 years.
posted by she's not there at 9:37 PM on March 5, 2018