Dairy Free Cooking Dairy-free Baking - Baking without Butter, Ashley Adams When to Use Oil or Margarine: Butter is a main ingredient in almost all baking recipes (breads, brownies, cakes, cookies). Most dairy-free recipes use oil, soy margarine or shortening for butter, sometimes cutting down the fat with pureed fruits (apples, bananas, dates). Many prefer to use liquid oils (canola, olive oil) in place of butter, and while this may still produce fabulous results, it is often the case that it cannot replace butter on its own. It is important to understand how butter functions in various baking recipes. In recipes for cakes and quick breads, the process of creaming butter with granulated sugar is extremely important to achieving the evenrising, rich, spongy texture. It is during the 3-5 minutes of beating the sugar into the butter until it is "fluffy" that the sugar granules cut into the butter and aerate the dense fat to give a rich texture and flavor that will also rise. Cakes Without Butter: Because of this "creaming" step, using oil alone in place of butter for cakes and cupcakes, instead of margarine or shortening, is problematic. Oils work best in recipes that use liquid sugars (honey, maple syrup, molasses) along with baking agents, another solid fat like ground nuts and some sort of emulsifying ingredient, such as eggs (e.g. combine ground nuts, oil, egg whites and pureed fruit to achieve both moisture and lift), without sacrificing texture. Separating eggs, beating yolks with sugar, and then folding egg whites into the other ingredients is another way to give oil-based cakes and quick breads both richness and lift and allows you to bake without margarine or shortening. It is often the case that oil-based dairy-free cakes that do not use eggs seem dense or lack the melt-in-yourmouth richness of those made with butter, but this can be remedied by combining oil with some sort of solid fat (ground nuts or chocolate). To achieve rise, use a combination of baking agents and soy yogurt, and use chocolate along with the oil and a little bit of sugar, to ensure the product is neither dense nor dry. Baking Cookies Without Butter: Cookies and shortbreads use butter for richness and density, but rely less on butter for "lift" needed in cakes. Cookies are often much easier to make dairy-free, and simply replacing butter with margarine or vegetable shortening always does the trick. Using oil in dairy-free cookie recipes, however, just as with cakes, depends on other ingredients. Using oil with liquid syrups and ground nuts produces a cookie with a shortbread texture, while using oil in combination with egg yolks and either liquid sweetener or granulated sugar produces a soft and chewy cookie with a cake-like texture. If you use oil and liquid sweetener without eggs, in most cases and depending on the amount of dry ingredients you use, you will either produce a thin, crisp cookie or a cookie with a muffin-top texture. Generally, in cookies, using margarine and shortening is the best choice. The exception is for baking cookies that do not use baking agents or are meant to be somewhat dense and dry. Baking Biscuits and Pastries: For rich baked goods that use baking agents or yeast and little or no sugar (biscuits, pastries) oil does not do these products justice and will leave them lacking in both texture and flavor. These are infinitely more successful using soy margarine or shortening. Combining oil with ground nuts in biscuits or pastries will not allow for the floury bread-like texture that defines these goods, and using extra eggs for richness will not allow for the desired dry texture and will produce a cake-like consistency. Not to say that oil cannot be used, but rather that the product will be vastly different from the traditional product, than if soy margarine, shortening or a semi-solid fat that more closely resembles butter were used. Unsalted Butter versus Margarine Most baking recipes call for unsalted butter, and all soy margarines and shortenings are salted. Simply reduce the amount of salt in a given recipe by ¼ t. per ½ cup margarine.
