CuiScine: Baking Fats

Credit: cookistry.com

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I have a confession to make. I am a terrible, prejudiced fat bigot.

Hm? Oh, my editor says I mean a “fat-bigot”. Like of oil, butter, and shortening. The choice a recipe makes on which fat to include will either garner my approval or my distaste. Unlike a bigot, though, I can offer at least an evidenced justification for my judgment.

To understand why it matters, we must first consider the composition of the three fats mentioned. Oil and shortening are pure fat, pure triglyceride molecules. Oil is made of unsaturated fats which have “U” shaped molecules that slip past each other, and so it is a liquid at room temperature. Shortening is made of saturated fats, which sit together closely in rows, so it is solid at room temperature. Butter, too, is made of saturated fats, but it also includes sugar and protein.

butter vs oil

So what? Well, this has an important consequence for flavor. Fellow butter-lovers are already familiar with what I am referring to. The best croissant is rich and buttery. Your favorite pies have flaky, buttery crusts. The unique composition of butter makes it able to undergo a reaction called the Maillard reaction which is responsible for this flavor that other pure fats simply cannot compete with.

The Maillard reaction involves amino acids (protein) and sugar. When the carbonyl group of a sugar reacts with the amine group of the amino acid, a compound is formed. There are a wide variety of compounds that are formed this way with varying amino acids, and each compound is a volatile organic compound which, as explored in a previous article, is responsible for odor and flavor. These compounds can then break down through other processes to form new flavors. The specific amino acids in butter are responsible for that rich, homey, Paula-Deen-proselytizing taste.

“But wait!” you exclaim. “We’ve gone over extensively how gluten is also a protein! And all my baking recipes have sugar! Why is butter so special? What’s the big idea?”

Oh you, trying to trip me up with your logical points. I would expect nothing less from a reader of CuiScine. It’s true that the Maillard reaction is occurring everywhere, in bread, crackers, tortillas, your seared steak, maple syrup… anywhere sugar and amino acids are coming together. One of the resulting compounds of the reaction is called melanoidin, which creates browning. So the brown crust of bread, or the browned bottom of a seared dumpling, or the brown exterior of a pretzel are all evidence of the Maillard reaction. Butter is just special because it adds a different combination of amino acids that are not present otherwise in recipes.

Now that I’ve gone and sung praises to butter, I would like to add a caveat here upon which to judge your recipes. Oil is excellent at providing moisture. It is, after all, liquid at room temperature. So a recipe that involves a strong flavor or that may not benefit from the additional richness of buttery flavor could benefit from the extra moisture oil provides. This is why many recipes for brownies will include oil instead of butter; brownies are dense and require moisture, and certainly that chocolatey flavor is intensely rich on its own without butter.

So for poor shortening, who is neither liquid at room temperature nor provides a new flavor profile when baking, what can we say?

Nothing. Shortening sucks.

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