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Unsalted butter

Wcsjohn@aol.com
Sat, 13 Dec 2003 05:20:00 EST
v103.n053.1
Larry

Like many kitchen mantras this common advice is partially good practice and 
partially rote repeating of "kitchen lore".

The basic reasoning is simple.

If a recipe uses a high ratio of butter to flour, Brioche being the obvious 
example, then, if you are going to keep the salt in the correct proportion 
in the final dough, you must either know the salt content of the butter you 
are using so that you can calculate the amount added in the butter, or use 
unsalted so that added salt can be measured accurately. The latter method 
is often easier particularly since older recipes were codified before 
nutritional labelling was mandatory.

That said, if a recipe calls for, say, a couple of tablespoons to a kilo of 
flour (ca 3%) then the amount of salt added via the butter is smaller than 
the accuracy limits of domestic measuring methods so it doesn't matter if 
the butter is salted or unsalted.

In practice, most salted butters run at about 1.5 % or so meaning that, to 
add a teaspoon of salt in the butter you would need to use 330 gm (about 12 
oz).

If your smallest reasonable measure is 1/4 tsp then to add that much salt 
in butter you would need 4 oz or so.

So, is it best to use unsalted butter for baking? As usual, the answer is 
"sometimes".

There are very few absolutes in baking bread.

Hope this is of use

John