Baking question: margarine or butter?

Pitlanepiglet

I use a mix of stork and butter as well, butter for "better" cakes and stork for other. In an ideal world I'd only use butter but I use stork to save cost. I've only used soft stork though, keep meaning to try the block version but I keep forgetting!

valk_scot

I use tub Stork for cakes and hard block Stork for everything else. I don't think home baking tastes right without it tbh, even if I use butter instead it doesn't taste right. I suppose that's what happens when you stick to one brand of ingredient for 40 years, lol.

Butter for butter icing and shortbread though. And I was taught (back in the dark ages) that you should use half white fat like Cookeen or Trex for shortness and half butter or marg for taste when making pastry. And it was Miss McArthur our cookery teacher that said that, btw, so it HAS to be right!

discountmummy

I stopped using or eating margarine since I found out that its only one molecule away from being plastic ...

sonnythecat

Well Miss Prosser, our home economics teacher, told me pretty much the same. And she was very scary and NEVER WRONG. lol;)

JulieGeorgiana

I use soft stork for cakes and find they come out fluffier and so much nicer!

I use it in scones and anything that asks for butter.

As it's soft you can mix it in so much easier too!

I use the hard stork for pastry, if you grate it into the flour it means you handle it less and you get a better pastry. As it's a mix of fats you use that instead of a mix of butter and lard!

At 55p a block it's so cheap!!! The soft stork is £1.50 kg as opposed to 98p for 250g of butter!

I am a stork convert... I only found it a few months ago... and now I am baking!

Penelope_Penguin

discountmummy wrote: »

I stopped using or eating margarine since I found out that its only one molecule away from being plastic ...

Sorry, but that's a major misunderstanding of the science of fats.

Chemically, margarine and butter aren't so dissimilar. However, margarine is usually formed by the industrial hydrogenation of vegetable fat, which often (but not always) forms trans-fats as an impurity. Trans fats are not essential for humans, unlike other fats.

I use butter and lard in my baking

I'll add this to the existing margarine or butter thread later.

SUESMITH_2

butter for christmas cakes etc. stork or similar for eveything else

Vaila

i dont use butter or marg, i use a soya alternative called "pure" we never had stork, or butter it was either utter butterly or a supermarket equivalent

Paulie'sGirl

Butter always.

I'm with PP, but I dislike the idea of eating something which is manufactured from its "normal state" as a grey liquid to be a yellow solid.

Doesn't really get more natural than shaking some cream until the fats separate out...

My Nana used stork, I can't abide the taste either

PGxx

Zooxanthelle

I always use Stork for baking. My mum always has done too so I guess I just followed on from her.