Reply to Would a cheap person ever use shortening in place of butter for chocolate chip cookies?

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Reply to "Would a cheap person ever use shortening in place of butter for chocolate chip cookies?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]LOL, you guys are so precious about your butter. Excellent bakers know when butter is the ingredient and when shortening is better, due to water and solids content, not to mention how it act with the other ingredients[/quote]

This, which is why it's ridiculous to see all these people who don't bake acting like butter is the expensive, high end ingredient. It's comical. I have shortbread cookies I make with olive oil (and rosemary and chocolate), and since you can really taste the olive oil, I use the expensive stuff I buy from the specialty Italian store instead of the giant bottle of California olive oil I buy at the grocery store. But there are lots of other recipes I make using vegetable oil or shortening because they give a better texture. Many recipes work better with shortening because it is more stable during cooking. Still other recipes, I will melt the butter before incorporating into the batter, rather than creaming with the sugar. For pastry, I sometimes use shortening because of the challenges of working butter into a dough when my kitchen is hot. Shortening doesn't get hard like butter when it's cold, but it also doesn't melt when it's warm, making it an easier option if I'm making pie crusts in July or at the same time as I'm baking something in the oven at 500 degrees making my kitchen run hot. I like having options.

It's such a DCUM thing to be like "ew Crisco, don't poor people use that? it must be bad." It's ignorant and elitist, and therefore perfectly on brand.[/quote]

1. Sometimes shortening is the correct ingredient for a recipe/ climate / technique - but 99/100 that is not true for chocolate chip cookies
2. Some of us who grew up in working class or poor households saw our moms and grandmothers bake almost exclusively with shortening or margarine - and it was purely about cost and shelf stability - not some superior knowledge of pastry technique. 
3. If you really bake a lot, you would know how butter has more than doubled in price over the last 6-8 months. So currently it is a “high end” ingredient. High enough that a less experienced baker may swap butter Crisco or margarine for a recipe developed for butter.

Your superior baking snobbery is also very on brand DCUM ridiculousness. [/quote]

You are ridiculous. A lot of those moms you mention grew up with their moms using crisco. Also back in the day, we all were told margarine was better for us. I grew up with that and Tang as being so much healthier.[/quote]

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