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When a recipe calls for "butter," which should you use, salted or unsalted (also known as "sweet")? If a recipe specifies unsalted butter and all you have in the refrigerator is salted, can you substitute?
To a very large degree, the difference between sweet and salted butter is a matter of taste. Salt is added to butter as a preservative; grocers tend to stock more of it and can buy it at a better price because it won’t spoil quickly. Sweet butter, which does taste quite different from salted butter, becomes rancid more quickly (although it freezes beautifully). You probably prefer the taste of the type of butter you are used to, and notice immediately if your toast is spread with the other kind.
Most of the time, salted and sweet butter can be used interchangeably. Both types of butter contain a minimum of 80 percent butterfat, about 16 percent water, and the rest milk solids; salted butter has about 1 percent salt by weight and slightly less moisture. If a recipe specifies sweet butter and yours is salted, simply cut back a bit on any extra salt in the recipe.
Delicate pastries, icings, and buttery sauces can easily taste too salty, so some cooks keep sweet butter on hand to use in certain dishes. In France, puff pastry is traditionally made with unsalted butter, although French butter contains about 90 percent butterfat and less water than American butter, making it difficult to get the same result with American butter of either flavor. C’est la vie.
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It was rainy and cold, the dogs were muddy, and the house looked more like a lair than a home. I was busy, pressed for time. But company was coming for supper, a dear friend we hadn’t seen in a long time. I decided on a simple menu (pasta, salmon, salad) I could cook at the last minute and an even simpler dessert: angel food cake, made from a mix to save time, topped with strawberries. I went right down and took a bag of berries out of the freezer.
I added water to the cake mix and poured it into an ungreased tube pan, as directed, then headed upstairs to work, congratulating myself that it had taken all of two minutes to make dessert. About 20 minutes into the baking time, I noticed that the cake smelled good. About 5 minutes later, it started to smell, well, burned. By the time I got downstairs, the house reeked of charred sugar. I opened the oven and discovered that the angel food cake had risen boldly about three inches above the pan, then lost its nerve and collapsed over the sides, spilling gooey batter over the rack and onto the floor of the oven. Burnt clumps of batter were everywhere.
I decided to let the cake bake until the part still in the pan was done. The spilled batter turned to cinders. Finally I took the cake out and turned it upside down to cool over a tall empty wine bottle. After about an hour and a half, I tried to pry the cake loose, but it was firmly attached to the pan. The tattered cake hung upside down all day. I didn’t know what had gone wrong, but now the oven needed cleaning as badly as the rest of the house.
I served the cake by pulling out hunks, layering them in a pretty glass bowl with the thawed strawberries, and weighting the whole thing down so the cake would absorb the berry juice. I whipped some cream to fluff over the top. It almost looked intentional.
A few days later, I was looking at cake pans in a store when I spotted an angel-food cake pan. It seemed much taller than mine, but weren’t all tube pans the same size? For the first time it occurred to me that I might have used a pan too small. I bought the pan and took it home. The new pan, at 4-1/4 inches high and 10 inches across, was an inch higher and an inch wider than the old pan.
So now I know why my cake exploded. I tried baking an angel food cake in my new pan, and it worked perfectly. I guess it wasn’t a total fiasco after all: we had a good visit with our friend, dessert was delicious, I got a new tube pan — and as of yesterday, my oven is clean!
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