The butter/margarine debate

Working with Planta

So, normally I bake with butter because like many other people, including my chef friend who graduated from le cordon bleu and claims that she's just a cook, thinks that butter is the main make-or-break ingredient of pastry. If you have good butter, you pastry will taste delicious!

To break tradition, and my currently unfounded bias that stems from me preferring butter than margarine on my toast, I decided to work with Planta (a kind of margarine).

I decided to bake something basic- vanilla cupcakes. Recipe from BBC- http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/cupcakes_93722

The very first difference was in the smell of my sugar and planta mixture. Normally i would get a rich buttery smell as I mix the sugar and butter together. My planta mixture smelt like oil- plant fats more than the buttery animal fats that I'm used to. As I swirled, a speck of it dropped out and I instinctively wiped it off the table with my finger and put the speck in my mouth. It taste like oil and sugar. Weird. Different. Healthier maybe? Since it's made if plant oil. Anyway I finished off the rest of the steps and tossed it into the oven to get the final verdict.

... and the verdict according to my brother was that it taste normal. It was only after I told him that I used Planta instead of butter that he remarked that the aftertaste was not one of buttery goodness but one that taste like Planta, and not as nice. Personally, I too felt that the cupcakes had a strong Planta taste and I would definitely prefer butter, for that rich buttery taste that makes the calories of eating the cupcake worthwhile.

In this taste test, both my brother and I are certainly biased because of our preference for butter. So in my biased opinion, butter is definitely better for pastry making as it gives the rich creamy and buttery goodness that only butter can. I guess a blind test, where I bake both kinds and ask people to tell me which they prefer, would be more fair. But I'm just baking cupcakes because I felt like eating them. So I'll spare the test. oh on a side note, I feel that using Planta did not affect the texture of my cupcakes in anyway. They came out light and fluffy.

And since I live in Singapore, my favourite brand of butter is SCS butter, although it is a little pricey and I normally use Buttercup butter (the cheapest) to make some pastries like brownies and chocolate cakes where I feel that I should save the extra money to get better quality chocolate (Hershey's chocolate), since the main make-or-break ingredient, as I call it, is chocolate. But if I'm making buttercream frosting though, quality butter is definitely a must, so I use SCS to give it a pure, creamy goodness (true to their packaging).

Anyway, since I decided to stick to using butter for pastries and I did not finish my Planta...I'll try making main dishes which require oil with it! I'm quite hopeful that it'll help to give the rich taste without the buttery effect in some recipes!