Replacing Butter: Vegetable Oil

It's been a while since I've been able to post something here on the blog, but I promise I have a good reason for it. Last month, I moved from Washington, DC (my home of the last few years) to New York City as part of a new job. I was so busy trying to get everything together, I just didn't have the time to bake or blog. 

But now I've been here for a couple of weeks, and last week I kicked off the new chapter of crazy baking. I began with some hamentashen for Purim, then made a gingerbread cake for Sabbath. I was all set to spend some time on Sunday making some cookies when an idea hit me. Now would be a good a time as any to revisit a problem that had been plaguing me for many years: how to replace melted butter in a cookie recipe.

[I suppose now is a good a time as any to alert you that there's going to be a lot of science talk in this post. Hold on to your hats. Also, it's worth noting that I relied heavily on Harold McGee's "On Food And Cooking" for the science aspect of this. It's an invaluable resource.]

As I've said before in other posts, when I make cookies for Sabbath or holidays, I usually need to keep them pareve, which means they have to be dairy-free (and meat free, but who's putting meat in a cookie?). The usual solution is to grab a stick of dairy-free margarine and substitute it for the butter. I've never been a big fan of this for a couple of reasons:

1) Margarine is pretty gross. 

2) Pareve margarine isn't so easy to find (at least back in DC).

3) Margarine is not so healthy for you. 

Let me take a moment to address that last one. While doing some research ahead of this post, I discovered that, for a while, margarine was thought to be healthier than butter. Butter is high in saturated fat (not heart healthy) while margarine is high in unsaturated fat (more heart healthy, relatively speaking). But more recently, scientists discovered that the process by which oil is made solid for margarine, known as hydrogenation, turns those healthier unsaturated fats into trans fats. Trans fats are just as bad as saturated fats, and in certain ways, somewhat worse. (For more information about this, I'd recommend the American Heart Association page about fats and oils, with thanks to Leah McGrath, R.D. for pointing me towards the source. You should follow her on Twitter at @InglesDietitian)

For all those reasons, I decided to see how well I could replace butter using liquid vegetable oil as the fat, thus preserving the unsaturated fats and being a heck of a lot more convenient to boot. I don't know about you, but I've always got a bottle of vegetable or canola oil in my pantry, while my margarine is very single purpose (and did I mention gross? It smells like apples and I can't tell why!). 

Taking a page out of my creaming method experiment, I decided I would take a cookie recipe that used melted butter, make a batch, then make a second batch with my substitution of vegetable oil. Then, I would get people to try one of each cookie and tell me what they thought. I would use that information to draw some kind of conclusion, although it would never stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny.

I chose America's Test Kitchen's Molasses Spice Cookies for this test; somewhat because I wanted my first NY post to pay tribute to my first DC post, but mostly because I like the recipe. I made the first batch without any problems then moved on to the second batch. I checked the recipe and saw that it needed 12 tablespoons of melted butter.  "Great," I can hear you saying. "Just put in 12 tablespoons of oil and be done! Right?"

Wrong! 

Interesting fact: Butter is required by law to be about 80% fat by weight. Look at any box of butter and you should see that for every 14 gram serving, only 11 grams are fat. Approximately 16-18 percent of the remaining weight is water (depending on who you ask) and the rest are milk solids and basic elements. The inclusion of water makes a difference in the final end product as well, as it leads to steam which gives some extra puffiness to the cookie during baking. Therefore, 12 tablespoons of oil was not the right way to go here.

Back when I made the first batch of cookies, I weighed the butter on my scale and got 172 grams. Using the ratio of 11 grams of fat per 14 grams of weight, I came up with about 135 grams of fat. Accounting for some rounding errors, I settled with 136 grams of oil. The water was a bit trickier. I was aiming for 32 grams of water, which would have been 18.6% by weight. Unfortunately, I over-poured a bit and ended up with 34 grams of water (19.7% by weight). I made a note to add a bit of flour later on to account for the extra liquid. 

I proceeded with making the cookies without any other incidents. One thing I did note was the difference in the consistency of the cookie batter. The butter batter was much stiffer and drier, whereas the oil batter was very loose and sticky. This wasn't particularly unexpected though. Butter is a semi-solid at room temperature, with some of the solid fat turning into liquid (and back again if the temperature is right) and other fat particles remaining in the liquid state once it's reached. So with time and the right temperature conditions, the butter-based batter would tend to be a bit firmer.

When I removed the oil-based cookies, I noticed that they were a lot flatter than I expected. I couldn't figure out what had happened. I thought i had accounted for the puff by adding the water! It wasn't until a couple of hours later that I realized what the culprit might have been: the lack of acid. Milk, believe it or not, is an acid; primarily lactic acid. That acid reacts with baking soda to produce lift and puff in the cookie. Oil, on the other hand, has no pH value and is therefore neutral. I wasn't getting as much of a reaction as I wanted from my leavening agents! I'm not sure what the best way to fix that would be, but that's for another experiment.

"Enough with the science!" I can hear you shouting. "What about the TASTE?"

OK, OK! I gave four people one of each cookie and asked them to tell me which they preferred and any other comments (A fifth person was given cookies as well, but I lost track of which cookie was which so I had to invalidate her data point. Sorry, Rebecca.). Three out of four preferred the oil cookie, praising its chewiness. Everyone agreed that the texture of the oil cookie was softer than the butter cookie (one called it "mushy"). Two people said the butter cookie was sweeter, which I could understand given the presence of lactose (milk sugar) in butter. Overall, everyone thought both cookies were good and they'd eat both again.

So what's the takeaway from this experiment? I think my oil and water solution gets me about 80% of the way towards a good replication of the butter cookie. I still need to find a way to introduce a bit more acid to work with the leavening agents. I also would like to see what would happen if I used a bit of shortening to provide more structure to the fat, since shortening is a solid at room temperature. It would negate a lot of the "health benefits," but I could live with that.  Broadly, I think the takeaway is that using the oil to replace the fat proportionally by weight works very well and is worth some more exploration in the future. 

Oh, and I guess the other takeaway is: Either way, you've still got a darn good cookie to eat.

Molasses Spice Cookies

A friend of mine who lives in my building was recently put on full-time bedrest due to her pregnancy. I hate to see friends of mine suffer through medical problems, so I decided to make her some cookies to cheer her up. I thought about what cookies to make, and settled on Molasses Spice Cookies.

One of my favorite sources of recipes is America's Test Kitchen, the same people who produce the magazine Cooks Illustrated. A couple of months ago, I won a copy of their new cookbook, The America's Test Kitchen Healthy Family Cookbook (ATK Healthy from here on). As soon as I received it in the mail, I promptly opened it and started to look for recipes that were interesting.

One recipe that stood out was Molasses Spice Cookies. I used to eat cookies like these from Trader Joe's until they stopped being kosher. I was very happy to find a recipe to replace them, and one that was healthy to boot. I made a batch in February, and they tasted amazing. They were also very easy to put together. The entire process lasted about 45 minutes. Quick, easy, and healthy? Those are winners in my book.

Today, when I started to make the cookies, I was partway through measuring out my flour when something caught my eye. The recipe in ATK Healthy calls for a combination of all-purpose flour and whole wheat flour. But the expiration date on my whole wheat flour was well in the past. Despite not seeing anything amiss in the flour, I chose not to take any chances and threw the flour out.

Now what was I supposed to do? I could replace the whole wheat flour with all-purpose, but I know that the two can't be substituted quite that easily. While I'm a bit vague on the exact science involved, I am aware that whole wheat flour has a different consistency and moisture-absorbing capability than standard flour. I hopped onto the Cooks Illustrated website to look for some guidance. Instead, I found a recipe for Molasses Spice Cookies that only used all-purpose flour! Problem solved, right?

Not exactly. The recipe on the site used the creaming method for the sugar and butter. For those unfamiliar, this is when you mix softened fat with sugar at a medium speed. It's an effect that can really only be achieved with an electric mixer. Unfortunately, I don't have an electric mixer to use with milk-products. For reasons of keeping kosher, I have to keep my mixer dairy-free. The advantage of the recipe in ATK Healthy was that it melted the butter instead of creaming it.

I decided to take a chance and use the ingredient list on the website and the methodology of ATK Healthy, hoping that it would all work out. I weighed out my flour and mixed in my baking soda and salt. I don't have a dairy skillet, so I used a 2 quart pot to melt my butter before mixing in my spices. Then, I transfered the melted butter to a bowl, stirred in white and brown sugar, molasses, an egg yolk, and vanilla extract. So far, everything looked to be going OK.

Then I started to mix in the dry ingredients and I hit a bit of a snag. Remember how I said I don't have an electric mixer for dairy? I had been using a wire whisk until this point, and it started to get too thick to mix. Ideally, I should have ditched the whisk for a spatula, but I didn't think about that until later. Instead, I kept straining to move the whisk through the mixture as best I could. Eventually, I tossed the whisk aside and just started to use my hands (yes, they were cleaned first). After a few moments, I had my dough.

I started to form small balls of dough, and noticed pretty quickly that the consistency was not the same as I remembered it. Still, I was determined to make these cookies. I continued to form the balls, rolled them in sugar, and put them on a baking sheet. Here's what the first batch of cookies looked like before they went into the oven.



I put them into the oven and prayed that they would be edible at the very least. I'm usually nervous about recipes I make for the first time, and changing methodologies qualifies as a first time thing for me. After 11 minutes, I removed the cookies from the oven...and breathed a sigh of relief. The cookies looked great. I put the second sheet of cookies in and they came out just as good.



I waited a little while before trying one. I overbaked them just a bit. Instead of being completely chewy, the exterior was slightly hard, but that was not enough to be considered a failure. I wrapped up 10 cookies and brought them downstairs to my neighbor. She was incredibly appreciative and took a bite out of a cookie. Her face lit up as she chewed. "This is great," she said. "I've always wanted to have a good chewy cookie. Thanks for bringing them by."

Mission accomplished.

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Molasses Spice Cookies (Adapted from Cooks Illustrated, January 2002 and America's Test Kitchen Healthy Family Cookbook)

1/3 cup granulated sugar (about 2 1/2 ounces)
2 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (11 1/4 ounces)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice (I had whole allspice which I coarsely ground)
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon table salt
12 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks)
1/3 cup packed dark brown sugar (about 2 1/2 ounces)
1 large egg yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup molasses (about 6 ounces), light or dark

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

2. Whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt in a small bowl.

3. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over low-medium heat. Stir in cinnamon, ginger, cloves, allspice, and pepper and cook until fragrant (about a minute). Pour the mixture into a large bowl and cool slightly.

4. Using a whisk, mix in the white sugar, molasses, brown sugar, egg yolk, and vanilla into the butter until smooth. To easily pour out molasses, I spray the inside of a measuring cup with cooking spray before measuring the molasses out. It makes cleanup a lot easier.

5. Stir in the flour mixture until combined.

6. Pour some white sugar (about 2-3 tablespoons) into a shallow bowl or plate. Take a heaping tablespoon of dough and roll it into a ball. Then, roll the ball lightly in the sugar until well coated and place it onto the baking sheet. If the sugar doesn't stick, you can lightly moisten your hands when rolling the dough into a ball. Space the balls about 2 1/2 inches apart.

7. Bake the cookies one sheet at a time for 9-12 minutes until the edges are set and beginning to brown, but the centers are still soft. Rotate the baking sheet halfway through.

8. Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before moving to a cooling rack (though I like to eat them when they're still warm.)