Merry wrote:

> Frank103 wrote:
>> I have heard that pastry chefs usually prefer unsalted
>> butter rather than salted butter. When it comes to
>> cakes and cookies, can you actually taste the
>> difference between salted and unsalted butter? I guess
>> people who are professionals can but can most others
>> tell the difference? thanks in advance. Frank
>
> I use unsalted butter- most recipes call for salt anyway,
> so why ruin what you are making with more. If I must use
> salted, I reduce the amount of salt called for in the
> recipe

Why is that such a hard thing to do - reduce the salt in
recipes?

I could taste the difference after a while on a low-salt
diet (that was a mistake on the doctor's part), but
otherwise, most people won't spot the difference.
Thankfully, I don't do that low-salt thing now.

If you look at the sodium content of the butter in your
fridge, you can calculate that there's about a teaspoon and
a quarter in the whole pound of butter. The numbers below
are so small that they need to be rounded unless we want a
multi-page treatise.

The usual ratio shown in the nutrition panel is 90 milligrams of
sodium in 14 grams (1 tablespoon) of butter. Sodium
comprises about 40% of the weight of salt. That means
roughly 225 milligrams or .225 grams of salt in a
tablespoon of butter. Those numbers are rounded, but they're
close enough. Extending that ratio to the whole pound
brings you to 32 tablespoons X .225 grams = 7.2 grams salt
per pound of butter. Various reliable sources give rounded
numbers that range from 7 grams salt per pound up to about 9
grams per pound. When you think that 1 ounce = 28 grams,
these are small numbers and a variation like this is
essentially meaningless unless it's a serious health
issue for some critical condition.

A cup of salt weighs about 12 ounces. A teaspoon of salt
(1/48 of a cup) weighs about 1/4 ounce or 7 grams. A pound
of butter is 2 cups volume and 454 grams weight.

A whole pound of butter will have about 1 1/4 teaspoons salt
or about .3 ounces by weight or about 8.8 grams. One
1/4-pound (1/2 cup) stick of butter would have about .3 of a
teaspoon salt or 2.1 grams and a tablespoon would have about
..26 grams. About 1/4 of one gram of salt per tablespoon of
butter; about 0.04 teaspoons, or less than 1/100 of an ounce
of salt.

Now that you know that, you can use salted butter and
compensate as you will for its salt content. My attitude is
not to even count it. In very specific taste tests we did in
my restaurants with recipes made with salted and unsalted
butter, the several people who participated found no
difference in taste or any other characteristic of finished
products. Not even in candies or lemon curd and the like
where you'd expect it to be of consequence.

Pastorio