You’ve heard it before: In baking, precision matters. But precision means more than just making sure your flour and baking soda are accurately measured. “How you prepare your ingredients is just as important as how you measure your ingredients,” says Shauna Sever, author of Midwest Made: Big, Bold Baking from the Heartland. Luckily, most recipes provide a few preparation guidelines—you know, like when they call for using room-temperature eggs or softened butter.
I’m usually the first person to remind you that you’re in charge, and that you don’t have to listen to anyone besides yourself. But if there ever is a time to follow someone else’s rules, it’s when you’re baking. You're mixing liquids and solids in a way that’s kind of architectural, capturing air to transform a mixture of disparate ingredients into a towering cake or a sheet of chewy-crispy cookies. Everything has to work together just so to achieve the perfect outcome.
And it turns out, ingredient temperature plays an important role in developing proper structure in many baked goods. Using room-temperature eggs, fat, and liquid, emphasizes Sever, is “the key in achieving a nice, velvety batter.” This is especially true when it comes to butter. When you beat room-temperature butter with sugar until the mixture becomes light and fluffy—this is called the creaming method—the sugar is able to perforate the butter and create tiny pockets of air. You’ll simultaneously get an even texture and more volume. (Just remember that room temperature is generally around 70 degrees, so be mindful of the temperature in your kitchen.)
“Soft but cool butter has a nice, creamy texture that makes it easy to beat with sugar, which incorporates air into batters and doughs that rely on the creaming method,” says Stella Parks, author of BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts. In turn, she explains, “this air keeps cookies thick, rather than spreading out flat.” And in cakes? “It helps them rise up fluffy and light.”
What happens when you use butter straight from the fridge? It’ll be stiff and difficult to beat—and you’ll end up with fragments in your dough. (Even in recipes that call for cold butter, like pie dough, it's possible for the butter to be too cold. Parks says super cold butter can make pie doughs dry and crumbly, leading bakers to compensate with more water—which increases gluten development, as well as the chances that the pie crust will shrink unattractively in the oven and turn out tough.) “Unless you're a more proficient baker than the person who wrote the recipe, you should always follow the directions,” Parks recommends.
But what happens when your butter is too soft? Simply put: It won’t hold air, and your cakes and cookies will come out flat. “If warm or melted butter is used instead of room-temperature butter, none of that air will be incorporated,” says Parks. Melted butter whips into frothy air bubbles that eventually collapse, leaving your batter greasy and heavy. This means your cookies can spread out into a puddle, and your cakes may become dense and gummy.
To ensure your butter is ready, take a cue from Sever, who says that the butter should look waxy, not shiny—if the butter is too shiny, it’s too melted. If you can press a small dent into it, it’s good to go.
Your butter’s temp isn’t the only one that matters. You’ve probably noticed that many ingredient lists mention room-temperature eggs. When you’re making a cake with the creaming method, adding cold eggs can curdle the batter—once cold eggs (or milk!) hit the butter, the butter will become firm, leaving you with a lumpy texture. “Curdled cake batters tend to rise poorly, so the finished cake will be rather dense,” says Parks. “Cold, curdled batters tend to dome rather than bake up flat—and they're often riddled with tunnels and holes.”
If you haven't remembered to remove your ingredients from the fridge a couple hours before baking, a few shortcuts help bring ingredients to room temperature quickly. Parks likes to use her microwave—just make sure to watch the ingredients closely, heating in five to 10-second intervals, because every microwave is different. “I've personally figured out a sweet spot for softening butter and warming milk," she says. "Be patient and start out with short bursts.” Additionally, you’ll want to place the stick of butter along the edge of the plate (not in the middle or pointing toward the middle), because stuff in the middle of the plate tends to heat first.
If you’re not into using a microwave, do as Sever does: Take your butter out of the refrigerator and cut it into thin slices before doing anything else in the recipe’s marching orders. By the time you get all your other ingredients out and ready, the butter will be at room temperature. And about those eggs? Gently place them in a bowl of hot tap water for a minute or two, and you’re good to go.
Repeat after me: I will not be that guy who ignores the instructions, brings trouble upon myself, and blames these troubles on the recipe. Baking is always going to be a little extra, requiring a bit more exactitude than the usual, everyday cooking tasks. And that’s okay, because thanks to that effort, the end result—whether it’s your best friend’s birthday cake or the tart you’re bringing to a dinner party someday—is definitely going to disappear from the plate.
