“Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.” I don’t think I’ve ever baked anything successfully
that started with this phrase. Pillows can be fluffy. Pussy cats can be fluffy. But I really
don’t know at which point butter can be considered to be fluffy. I grew up in a cooking household,
not a baking household. And I’ve only worked in restaurant kitchens, not baking kitchens.
So I have never witnessed the creaming of butter and sugar in real life. I have watched a ton of
videos, but no reasonable youtuber will show you the entire creaming process because it’s
so boring. Sure, the butter in the videos usually looks softer and lighter in color after beating,
but it’s really hard to tell what that corresponds to in real life.
So imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered Stella Parks’
article in seriouseats.com that shows the creaming process with the addition of the
blue food color. It’s absolutely brilliant! With the color added,
you can really see the transformation the butter and sugar go through.
You know how I always tell you that some things can’t be learnt while making dinner. Knife Skills
for example. I always tell my students to get a bunch of celery or carrots, set a timer for 20
minutes and just chop without worrying how all this celery can be used. If you don’t need it,
trash it. Well, I think it’s time to follow my own advice and make some light and fluffy blue butter.
The first thing we need to do is ensure that our mixer has the correct clearance between
the paddle and the bottom of the bowl. I’ve made a video about this before. But here is something
I didn’t realize. My mixer gets out alignment after every single vigorous dough kneading.
I thought that this alignment is something you need to do once in a blue moon, but mine needs
it every time I use it. It’s not that important for some tasks, like kneading bread dough,
but really important for creaming butter and sugar. If the mixer you have is a KitchenAid
and you live in the US, here is how to check the clearance. Put a dime in the bottom of the
bowl. Fit the mixer with a paddle attachment and turn it on low. If the dime isn’t moving,
your bowl is too low. If the dime is spinning continuously, the bowl is too high. Find the
manual for your mixer on-line and adjust the screw that controls this clearance. When the
dime moves a little every time the beater hits it, your clearance is correct. Obviously, this only
works for KitchenAid and people with American coins, but all mixers that have the potential
to get out of alignment have instructions on how to adjust the bowl height, so check your manual.
Most recipes that tell you to cream the butter, tell you that it should be at room temperature.
Since I keep my kitchen very cold in winter, I have gone as far as to warm up my butter in a
sous-vide water bath to 72 Farenheight. I mean 72 seems like a reasonable room temperature, right?
Turns out my efforts were not only unnecessary, but terribly destructive. According to Stella
Parks, you want to start with the butter between 60 and 64 degrees.
The ideal temperature for incorporating air into butter and sugar is 65 to 68 degrees,
but during the mixing process the butter will go up in temperature due to friction, so you
want to give yourself room for that to happen. If your kitchen is warmer than 70, start with
the butter at 60. Since mine is currently cool, around 66, I am starting with the butter at 64.
I beat 2 sticks of butter for about a minute to soften it. Then added
280 grams of sugar. This is a typical amount for cakes and cookies. I wasn’t
sure how many drops of blue coloring to add, but eventually I settled on 3.
I used to think the faster the better. Turns out that’s not the case at all.
Maybe with a hand mixer you want to use a high speed, but with a stand mixer this
will result in overbeating and collapse of those delicate little air bubbles.
The correct speed for a stand mixer is medium, which is about 4 on a KitchenAid.
Once the butter and sugar looked incorporated, I decided to check what’s happening underneath.
This mixture wasn’t nearly as even as I expected. Without the blue color,
I would have never noticed. After I gave it a scrape,
I beat this mixture for 6 minutes taking samples after every minute. Here is what it looked like:
In the end
my butter ended up at 68 degrees, so I am hoping I did it correctly.
Blue color makes it really eye opening. For some reason most recipes say that it takes
2 to 3 minutes to get the butter to the light and fluffy stage. No fucking way!
The difference between the 5th and 6th minute wasn’t big. I could have stopped
after 5 minutes. But the difference between the 3rd and 5th minute was significant.
You know what I didn’t show you yet? How much scraping I had to do. No videos show that because
it’s boring. Most recipes don’t even mention it. But the blue color made the uneven mixing really
obvious. I stopped at 2 minutes, removed the bowl and the beater and gave them a good scrape.
I stopped at 4 minutes and did the same. You’d think that after 4 minutes of beating everything
would be perfectly even, right? No -- look at all those darker patches. While the top was getting
nicely whipped, the bottom was just sitting there attached to the bowl. Only after the 5th minute
did my mixture start to look even. So don’t be lazy and scrape thoroughly and frequently.
I think I finally know how to cream butter and sugar,
but I have just one more question. Many recipes call for only 1 stick of butter. I wasn’t sure
if my stand mixer could deal with such a small quantity. So I repeated the whole thing all over
with 1 stick of butter, 140 grams of sugar, and roughly half the food coloring. It turned out fine
and went through all the same stages as 2 sticks of butter. I am guessing the reason I always have
a hard time with small quantities is that I don’t adjust the bowl clearance often enough.
I want to say a huge thank you to the one and only Stella Parks for this absolutely amazing
tutorial. I’ll link to Stella’s article in the description below. What am I going to do with
this new found knowledge? I really don’t know yet. I am not a huge cake and cookie person.
That’s why I could live this long and still not know how to cream butter and sugar. But if you
have some really fabulous goodie that requires this technique, let me know in the comments.
Here are more thought provoking culinary tutorials for you to check out and if you
are ever in the Boston area, maybe I’ll see you in one of my classes.