Baking can you substitute margarine for butter

It all comes down to selecting the right kind of margarine for your cooking. Margarine is used in equal amounts as that of butter.

If your recipe calls for 1 cup of butter, you will need 1 cup of margarine as a replacement. Margarine has vegetable oil as a substitute. Vegetable oil has hydrogen added to it by a process called hydrogenation. Margarine is usually fortified with fatty acids to add nutritional value. The omega 3 and 6 Fatty acids come from canola or soybean oil.

Margarine has more water and less fat, which owes to being a healthier option. Margarine can be dairy-free or dairy-based. Inarguably, butter is superior when it comes to attaining a richer and creamier taste of baked goods. The substitute is not just suited for baking. For cooking or meal preparation, margarine is a great option. Butter naturally has a yellow color due to the presence of vitamin A.

A pigment called carotene causes the hint of yellow. Most baked goods require you to whip sugar in butter before baking. The reason to cream butter with sugar is to mix it thoroughly and let the air be incorporated into the batter. It has about half the saturated fat and cholesterol compared to regular butter.

Although whipped butter should only be used as a spread, and should not be used for baking — since 1 cup of whipped butter is not the same amount weight as 1 cup of regular butter. Other options are butter brands that have been blended with other oils like olive or canola oil , these will have similar fat and cholesterol levels as whipped butter, yet they can be used in all your cooking or baking needs. Margarine is created by a chemical process of adding hydrogen molecules into vegetable oil.

There are both dairy and dairy-free options available. Types of margarine can vary in the amounts of trans fats they contain.

The fatty acids used are extracted from plant sources, like canola or soybean oil. Your finished product will definitely result in undesirable quality and texture. In most baking recipes where butter is not the main ingredient, margarine should be fine as a substitute.

Just be aware that for cookies, you may want to chill the dough before you bake it, to prevent the cookies from spreading out too much. Where butter is the main ingredient in a recipe, like in puff pastry, pie crusts, shortbread, and spritz cookies, these types of recipes require specific ratios of fat and moisture in order to succeed, so butter should not be replaced with margarine.

I speak of this from personal experience — My sister set the cake I made on top of the fridge now I realize that is a very warm place to be! It begins as cream, after all, and margarine is made from vegetable oil. Butter's high fat content is also what gives baked goods their texture.

Margarine, which can contain more water and less fat, may make thin cookies that spread out while baking and may burn. Butter is also the better choice for frying. Because it's more resistant to being broken down by heat, says noted food scientist Harold McGee in his cook's bible On Food and Cooking , butter doesn't become gummy the way unsaturated oils do.

In baking, melted margarine could work in recipes that call for melted butter, but in recipes that call for softened butter, swapping in tub margarine may change the texture; for example, cakes will be less tender, and cookies will generally spread out more and be less crisp. Stick margarine, also known as block or hard margarine, has the same texture as butter, and is therefore a better substitute for baking and cooking than tub margarine.

However, stick margarines are generally high in trans fats, which have been shown to be bad for our heart. In our test kitchens, we develop and test our recipes using butter instead of margarine in cases where either one could conceivably work. Similarly, in cases where either oil or melted margarine could be used, we choose to use oil.