Sweet ’n’ salty
Salted butter is back and making dessert even better
People who write about food or cook professionally wouldn’t dream of using salted butter in our sweets or — since most of us don’t bother to keep it around at all — in our savoury food, either.
Why not? Conventional wisdom says we should use only unsalted butter so we can control the salt, adding it separately.
But a few months ago, when cookbook author Alison Roman’s recipe for salted butter and chocolate chunk shortbread went viral, I began to investigate the “other” butter.
Those of us who have made a big deal about salting our sweets in recent years have assumed that our predecessors liked sweet desserts. But Food 52’s Amanda Hesser has a theory that salt was excluded from old recipes because it was already incorporated into the butter.
From there, I reasoned, as unsalted or “sweet” butter came into fashion, people continued to rely on those old formulas, swapping out salted butter — without accounting for the salt.
Cooks “just forgot that not using the same butter is going to affect the final taste,” said pastry chef Olivia Wilson, co-owner of Chairlift Bakery and Brenner Pass in Richmond, Va.
Perhaps, I concluded, the current trend for salted desserts is simply a reaction to a lack of balance created when the salt was written out of recipe history.