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Butter Flavored Shortening

I have a recipe for molasses cookies that calls for 3 cups of butter-flavored shortening. I don't want to use that (actually, I don't have any; I never buy the stuff). Can I substitute 24 ounces of room-temperature unsalted butter? I hate to waste my recent gift of molasses in a runny, burnt cookie. Thanks for the advice.

7 Comments:

You can usually substitute butter for shortening as long at a 1-1 ratio.

Substituting butter will work, but it will make the cookies thinner, and they'll spread more (I've learned the hard way). Be sure to leave a lot of room between them. Alternatively, you could try a 50-50 ratio or use cake flour instead of all-purpose (according to Shirley Corriher's CookWise).

well I don't know how it would affect the texture off the top of my head, but there are three main differences that I can think of between the two. Standard American butter is sometimes as high as 19% water, as opposed to 0% in shortening. Shortening is also going to be very refined, and thus have no solid particles, unlike butter. And butter melts at a different temperature, I believe lower, than shortening.

For more info about what exactly the change will do to the texture of the cookies, see here: http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/Season3/Cookie/CookieTranscript.htm
There's more there than I could easily summarize here. If you don't want to read that whole thing, you can just check out Alton Brown's recipes for thin, puffy, and chewy cookies on the food network website, but you obviously won't get the full explanation.

24 ounces of butter is a pound and a half. That's waay too much, if you do decideto try it. Remember a fluid ounce and an ounce by weight are not always the same thing.

Thanks for the help. I got cold feet on the butter/shortening substitution (I thought 24oz of butter was a LOT, too), so I searched for another recipe. Turned out more cakey than the butter-flavored shortening chewy one, but still good.

That sounds like a huge recipe - what's the yield?

Also, butter and shortening have distinctly different effects on cookies. Unless you want to profoundly change the outcome, I wouldn't sub more than half of the shortening for butter.

(Mmmmm molasses cookies make me think of Christmas... )

I use the butter flavored shortening instead of butter because it fits my budget more and also it taste more buttery than butter. I use the Crisco brand which it now comes in 0 grams of Trans Fat . This is more Healthy wise. To substitiute BFS for butter is 1 cup BFS + 6 tsp water = 1cup (2 sticks) butter. To make a chewier cookie leave off the water when using BFS , adding the water will make it more cakey. The BFS makes a great buttercream frosting.

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