[Sca-cooks] butter-flavored crisco

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Micaylah:
>  >Has anyone used this, outside of making the recipe on the box,
>>successfully.
>>
>>I made the chocolate cookie recipe on the box and they were
>>excellent but as a
>>substitute I found it didn't work in the one recipe I tried it
>>with.  This
>>was my mother's shortbread cookie recipe.  The cookies tasted
>>horrible and
>>were incredibly fragile.
>>
>>Marina
>
>Jane errrr Marina, it sucks. It doesn't firm up even when in the fridge
>so you cant cut it into dry ingredients properly. It has a definite
>"theatre popcorn butter flavour" that really has nothing to do with
>actual butter.
>
>Unfortunately I learnt by experience. Others mileage may very though.
>
>Micaylah

I assume the trouble is in a lack of water content. Crisco, even 
butter-flavored, I assume, has basically no water, and allows for 
virtually zero gluten development, hence the trouble with 
ultra-fragile shortbread. Shortbread usually uses very little water 
-- normally whatever's in the butter -- but a little is still more 
than none.

I could imagine that a one-to-one substitute of BFC for butter might 
similarly lead to... um... powerfully-flavored, artificially-flavored 
foods, since that water content, which might be compensated for in a 
recipe crafted for that ingredient, is absent in another recipe not 
specifically designed for its use.

You would, presumably, want to use a little less BFC than actual 
butter, and a little more of another liquid, I think. Probably Bear 
could give you a more reliable mathematical formula, but off the top 
of my head I don't remember what it is.

As for firming up in the fridge, I believe there's a BFC product 
whose purpose is to get people to buy their partially hydrogenated, 
therefore partially saturated fats, and drizzle it on rolls, 
biscuits, baked potatoes, and such, while still feeling virtuous for 
no good reason. But there's also a somewhat firmer product that's the 
same consistency as regular Crisco, and while this doesn't firm up as 
hard as butter in the fridge, it does firm up well enough for most 
pastry uses. I'm not sure if you're talking about the liquid stuff or 
the semi-solid tin of Crisco, but commercial bakeries do sometimes 
use such shortenings to make puff pastry and such, so it's safe to 
assume you can do a decent job with it if you treat it right.

But then again, I don't like the stuff, either.

Adamantius