Baking question: margarine or butter?

Ben84

Penelope_Penguin wrote: »

Good post

Am I correct in thinking that a lot of margarines, which use vegetable fats that have not been hydrogenated, contain palm oil? That has its own issues, not least environmental.

I'm still going to be buying butter and lard for baking

Palm oil is now the leading cause of rainforest deforestation, but it's hard to avoid. I have yet to find a margarine that doesn't contain it, and eating butter and lard in place of palm oil based margarine is, perhaps surprisingly, very likely to result in you consuming more palm oil as the animals are eating it in their feed (as well as soya which is bad news for the rainforest too), and the efficiency of their conversion of their feed in to edible fats is worse than us just eating the palm oil ourselves.

I'm not sure I'll be stopping consuming palm oil (directly or indirectly) any time soon, even though I'd like to, but I have been cutting back on how much I use. I've learnt how to make cakes and biscuits with olive oil, and actually they come out really good. The filippo berio web site have some nice recipes, but using olive oil in baking is traditional in the Mediterranean and you can easily find many recipes elsewhere.

Linda32

Hi,

I used to use Stork, but I'm sure I do better now that I use half butter half cooken, well for pastry anyway, its much crisper.

emiff6

I use butter, British or Irish, for all baking. I would rather spend a bit more and bake a little less using a purer, better flavoured ingredient. IMO butter gives a much better flavour to all baking. My Grandmother (born 1899) would never have margarine in the house, and I see no good reason to break with tradition!

Vaila

we are a marg household , we use a vegan soya or sunflower spread. gives a nice light taste and texture.

stiltwalker

Butter gives a better flavour and colour but gives a slightly denser cake, cake made with marg will rise slightly more but be less rich in flavour. I always use the supermarket version of utterly butterly for baking after I took over running a tearoom several years ago and it was the only thing in the fridge and was really suprised what nice cake it made after having been really sniffy about it for years and only using butter. This seems to be a really good compromise of lightness and good flavour.

RealButter

Butter all the way for me too

It is just my opinion that it is better in baking, but surely nobody can deny it's so much better than marg on a crumpet?!

emiff6

RealButter wrote: »

Butter all the way for me too

It is just my opinion that it is better in baking, but surely nobody can deny it's so much better than marg on a crumpet?!

Ooh, crumpets and butter! I was going to make bread........now I'll make crumpets too!

boydE

I made some chocolate flapjacks which are lovely, I used butter which cost around 90p per pack.
could i have used stork which works out half the price or does it have to be butter?

Fruball

You can use stork in all baking... it doesn't give the same flavour as butter so I like to use half and half

HTH

UnderPressure

As Frugal has said you can use it not for me though I much prefer real butter it does make a big difference to the taste IMO.