I have mixed feelings about Pi(e) Day, my ambivalence being rooted in the fact that it seems to get more love than the actual National Pie Day, which happens to be my birthday. If your argument is that I should get over myself and just embrace the fact that we have two days dedicated to eating pie: you are correct, and I’m working on it.
What I am not working on, however, is any sort of personal growth that would result in the abandonment of my remarkably stubborn position that salted butter is the superior butter. Butter is tangentially relevant to pie, and my arguments - like today’s date - should appeal to the mathematically inclined, so here we are: a Butter about butter for Pi(e) Day.
There is no new recipe today, but if you’re in need of a pie primer, here are two good places to start. And if you missed this weekend’s recipe, you can find it right here; it’s not a recipe for pie, but its deliciousness - like pi - is infinite. xo.
A Defense of Buying, Using, and Liking Salted Butter
A week or two ago, America’s Test Kitchen (a huge food-media company that I really love) published this Instagram post: a brief infographic about why you should not cook with salted butter. It was sent to me by friends and Butter readers almost a dozen times that day. I’ve promised, at random moments in the past, to one day explain my love of salted butter, and it seems the time has come. I hope that I haven’t lost any of you to the dark side as a result of ATK’s post, but if I did I’m here to do my best to win you back. (P.S. If anyone from ATK is reading: I love you.)
The main points from their infographic were these:
The amount of salt in salted butter varies by manufacturer.
Salted butter contains more water than unsalted, and this water can interfere with gluten formation.
Baked-goods, specifically, suffer from the use of salted butter, and can turn out “mushy and pasty.”
Let’s take down this hateful, hurtful wall, brick by brick.
Firstly, bullet-point number one is true: the amount of salt in salted butter does vary by brand, and it varies significantly. A brief Google investigation will turn up butters with sodium contents that range from 500mg to 1000mg per 1/4 lb (one stick). That’s a huge swing! The saltiest butter on the market could be two times as salty as the least-salty salted butter (yes, I proofread that sentence). That sure sounds like a nightmare for consumers, right? Hold that thought; we’ll come back to it.
Secondly, briefly, bullet-point number two is also mostly true: among American butters, salted butter does have more water than unsalted. It’s worth pointing out, though, that European or Euro-style butters (which can be imported or domestic) have more fat than American butters do, and more fat means less water - which means that a salted Euro-style butter will still have less water than an unsalted American butter. If it sounds like we’re trying to account for a lot of variables within the butter market, here: you’re on to something, so hold that thought, too.
The second part of Bullet No.2 is where I really start to take issue. What begins as just a matter of semantics (water doesn’t “interfere” with gluten formation: it is essential to gluten formation) becomes a whole mess when it is suggested that this water results in “mushy, pasty” pastries. It’s hard to know how they qualify this judgement - Says who? and Compared to what? - but I flatly do not accept the premise that salted butter makes baked goods have an undesired texture, for a LOT of reasons.
Again, water doesn’t interfere with gluten formation. It would be more accurate to say that “too much water can interfere with gluten formation,” because that is true: gluten can only absorb about two times its weight in water before it begins to fall apart. But when we’re talking about baked goods - while it certainly varies widely depending upon what you’re baking and which recipe you’re using - the amount of water needed to weaken the gluten structure of almost any home-scale recipe to the point of collapse is significant - like, “measurable in cups” significant.
For context, consider the amount of water in butter. There is a lot of variability amongst water content in butters available for purchase in the US, depending upon the style and the salt content: it ranges from 10% water by weight to about 18%. Like the spectrum of salt contents that we discussed above: that’s a huge swing! Again, a nightmare for consumers - right?
It sure seems so, because there is absolutely a need for some precision when it comes to baking. But when you do a few conversions and a little bit of math, it’s easy to get these percentages into a format that is more easily quantifiable to the home cook: a butter that’s 10% water by weight contains a little less than 3/4 of a tablespoon of water per 1/4 lb. stick; at the other end of the butter subset, if we look at a brand and style with a high water content of 18%, there’s still less than 1.5 tablespoons of water per stick of butter.
That means that the range of water content in butters varies by only about 3/4 or 0.75 tablespoons per quarter pound - a little more than two teaspoons. And again, this is the entire range of water contents; some brands within that range vary from others by as little as a fraction of a teaspoon of water per stick.
You know what else has a widely variable water content? Eggs - which are also often used in baking - are nearly 75% water, and can vary in terms of water content by a tablespoon or more per egg. Vanilla (and other) extracts - which are also also often used in baking - are over 50% water, and can vary in terms of water content from brand to brand by as much as 1 teaspoon of water per tablespoon of extract. Dairy and non-dairy milks, yogurts and sour cream, non-dairy butter alternatives, fruit purees, nut butters - these are all things that we use frequently in home baking that vary greatly in terms of water content from style to style and manufacturer to manufacturer. No one ever nitpicks about these disparities. Why does butter take all the heat?
These ranges of water contents are not statistically insignificant, but when we’re baking on a home scale - one dozen banana muffins, one batch of pie dough, a few dozen cookies - the amounts are so reduced that the disparities are largely rendered inconsequential to the final product. What’s more, who here has ever read a note in a recipe that tells you it’s OK to add a few splashes of water as needed, or that relative humidity might affect the amount of water you have to add to your dough? You’ll see this even in recipes that call for ingredients by incredibly precise weights. Precision is so important to successful baking, and I’d never argue that, but there is a human, artistic element to it, as well - and the suggestion that the difference of a teaspoon of water would be enough to denature the gluten in a recipe for 12 big biscuits is just bananas.
And that’s just the water! We haven’t even gone back to the discussion of salt, although it follows a similar trajectory. Again: the sodium content of butters sold in the US can range from 500mg to 1000mg per 1/4 lb stick - huge swing, yes. Let’s break it down into something more recognizable: that’s a range of less than 1/10th of a teaspoon of salt per stick, to as much as a whopping… 1/5th of a teaspoon. I acknowledge that this is statistically a remarkable difference - one brand could have literally twice as much salt as another - but we’re not talking about 4 cups compared to 2. We’re talking fractions of teaspoons. The saltiest butter on the market contains about half a teaspoon more salt than unsalted butter, per stick. That’s all. And (just as with water) there are other ingredients frequently used in baking that (1) contain salt and (2) can vary in salt content from brand to brand or style to style: eggs contain salt, and baking soda, and baking powder, and lots of other things that no one ever gets all worked up about.
It is very frequently argued that salted butter should never be used as an ingredient because of this variability: you lose control over the level of salt in your dish, because of the inconsistency from box to box. It’s an argument that seems sound - looks good on paper - but you know, now, that we are talking about half a teaspoon of salt per stick. I mean this literally: I can not think of a single thing that I would make that contains less than half a teaspoon of salt. Even when cooking with salted butter - even if I’m using an entire f&@#ing stick - I taste first and I add more salt. Salted butter is not salty. It is seasoned. Take a bite of it and see. It has flavor. Unsalted butter is good but it is boring and if you are literally always going to add more salt anyway then why are we buying it? It just seems so silly and the arguments against it are so unsubstantiated and they make me so mad. Clearly.
AND ALSO - salt strengthens gluten. So not only does salted butter not contain anything even close to the amount of water needed to wreck the gluten structure in a baked good, it also provides it a little extra backbone! Mushy? Pasty? What? Fat, on the other hand, does interfere with gluten formation - so it actually stands to reason that the lower-water, higher-fat unsalted butter would be resulting in those “mushy, pasty” baked goods. What now, Test Kitchen? (J/K, love u.)
(Also also, while this didn’t fit anywhere else but feels very important to include because I do not want to hurt anyone: while I dismiss the significance of the varying amounts of sodium in butters from a culinary standpoint, I do not know if those amounts are of significance to those who must follow a medically-prescribed high- or low-sodium diet, so if you cook for someone who fits that description, please check with them.)
Otherwise: salted butter forever, enjoy your pi(e), amen.