What is the best butter for buttercream frosting?
Using unsalted butter helps to ensure a consistent result. You can however use salted butter, omit additional salt and have a delicious cake frosting. The most important thing to do when whipping up a batch of buttercream is that it's room temperature!
Kerrygold, Organic Valley, and other European styles unsalted butter are great to the taste of buttercream too.
European Style Butter, such as Land O Lakes® Extra Creamy Butter, is perfect for spreading on bread and for all your baking and cooking needs. Extra Creamy Butter has a higher fat content and rich and creamy texture, making everything taste better.
Swiss meringue buttercream is easier to prepare, but does it taste as good? That's a personal preference. To me, the two frostings taste almost identical. However, I find the Italian meringue frosting to be a bit easier to work with and the Swiss meringue frosting to be a tad bit lighter.
Swiss meringue buttercream is probably the most standard buttercream for pastry professionals. It is incredibly smooth, making it an extremely popular choice for icing cakes. Compared to American buttercream, it has a much stronger butter flavor, but is considerably less sweet.
But when choosing butter for baking, I always use unsalted, and we recommend you do, too. Salt acts as a preservative and masks any potentially funky flavors, so salted butter often sits on grocery store shelves longer than unsalted does. To ensure you're using fresh butter, choose unsalted.
What Does Italian Buttercream Taste Like? Because of its high butter content, Italian meringue frosting is rich and creamy in flavor. It's not nearly as sweet as traditional buttercream frosting, but has a smooth, buttery flavor – perfect for pairing with a rich chocolate cake!
Grainy buttercream usually happens during the process of heating the egg whites and the sugar. If you don't heat it long enough, the sugar granules won't dissolve, leaving a grainy texture even after you beat in your butter.
Overall, European-style butters are favored for their rich taste — a direct result of the higher butterfat content. More butterfat also means a softer texture, faster melt, and often, a saturated yellow hue.
European butter is often fermented, given it a tangy, slightly sour taste. These butters are often richer (more butterfat), making it ideal for baking since it melts quicker. American butter is monitored and regulated by the USDA, which states that a butter must contain at least 80 percent butterfat to make the cut.
What butter do Top chefs use?
It has a higher butterfat content than American butter—82% vs 80%. The amount of difference sounds small but it is believed to be enough to account for the difference in flavor and texture. More fat, more flavor. That's why so many chefs rely on European butter to bring out the best in their dishes.
For baking purposes, the Test Kitchen recommends using unsalted butter so you can better control the amount of salt that goes into the recipe. Salted butter is best for serving at the table with bread or to flavor a dish, like mashed potatoes.
Italian meringue buttercream, also known simply as Italian buttercream, is the most stable of all of the buttercreams but also the most difficult to make. This style of buttercream gets its name because it starts out with the process of making Italian meringue.
Most people will recommend using Swiss meringue, Italian meringue, or American buttercream for piping flowers. These types of buttercream are recommended because they're sturdy enough to support your piped designs. American buttercream is certainly the easiest for beginners to make.
Temperature Issues and Fixes
Pop the whole bowl in the fridge for a few minutes, then re-whip. Continue chilling and re-whipping until the buttercream is no longer soupy. If your buttercream looks chunky or curdled, it's probably too cold.
American buttercream is sweeter than Swiss or Italian. It forms a “crust” when exposed to air – perfect for paining and piping on. Swiss Meringue buttercream is silky smooth and light. It's perfect if you're looking for a slightly less sweet buttercream.
Swiss meringue buttercream is the perfect choice for couples who want their wedding cake to have great flavor without being cloyingly sweet and heavy. It also creates cakes with a smooth finish, adds Clark.
Swiss meringue buttercream is supremely better in both flavor and texture than American buttercream. Once you try it, you will want to use it on all of your cakes, cupcakes, cookies, everything! It is silky, pipes beautifully, and is very stable.
Best European-Style Butter: Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter
It's pliable even straight out of the fridge (a property of fats and oils called plasticity) and it softens and becomes spreadable quickly at room temperature because there's less water, which takes longer to warm up than fat.
The first thing you notice when you unwrap a block of Bordier butter is its yellow, creamy surface. That — and its silky texture and savory flavor — make it a favorite among French chefs.
Why does Irish butter taste better than American butter?
Because the remaining percentage in butter contains mostly water, it takes away the flavor and creaminess of the butter. Even though the butters can be used interchangeably, Irish butter has a higher fat and lower water count than American butter, so it has a better taste and makes it a better choice for baking.
Italian buttercream is meringue-based and very light, creamy, and less sweet than American buttercream. American buttercream is sweeter but has the advantage of being quick, easy to make, and sturdy.
But the buttercream should be light and fluffy, not thick and greasy. If yours tastes like you're eating a stick of butter, perhaps your meringue wasn't whipped to stiff peaks before adding butter, or the butter was too cold, in which case it just needs some more whipping. Or you added too much butter.
Swiss meringue buttercream, also shortened to SMBC, is a buttercream frosting recipe that is creamy, thick, buttery, and holds its shape well. This meringue buttercream comes together easily with only cooked egg whites and sugar, butter, vanilla extract, and salt.
To make the frosting extra smooth, stir it by hand with a rubber spatula for a minute or two right before you use it. It's an arm workout, but it's worth it! Push the frosting back and forth and spread it around the side of the bowl. This will push out any extra air and make it easier to smooth onto cakes or pipe with.
Why is My Buttercream Drooping and Wilting? If your buttercream looks like it's falling off the cake or your piped decorations begin to droop, it's very likely the temperature in the room is too hot, causing your buttercream to melt.
Italian buttercream can be left at room temperature for 2-3 days. I usually refrigerate leftover buttercream if I'm not going to use it in 24 hours. It can be frozen for 6 months or more. Bring the buttercream to room temperature and re-whip until it's a smooth consistency before you use it.
Bordier. France's Bordier is often considered by many in the culinary world to be among the best butter brands on the market.
European butter is typically unsalted and cultured, whereas Irish butter is often salted and uncultured. The bright yellow hue is a hallmark of pure Irish butter. The vibrant color is so highly valued that some butter producers mimic it with artificial coloring.
This type of butter is usually more nutritious and higher in beta carotene and omega-3 fatty acids, too. European versus American butter - European-style butter contains more butterfat than American-style butter, 82 percent versus 80.
Is Danish butter European butter?
European, Creamy, Smooth
Crafted with 85% butter fat for a richer taste and texture, Danish Creamery European Style Butter performs flawlessly in baking applications.
French butter is indeed higher in fat than American butter – about 82 percent minimum, as opposed to the 80 percent required in the U.S. But in addition to being higher in fat, French butter is also cultured, a process whereby live active cultures are added to the cream before the butter is churned.
European Butter
The standards for the minimum amount of butterfat in butter are different in Europe and America. Abroad, the minimum is 82 percent; here, it's 80 percent; everywhere, it's lower for salted butter. So, whenever you use European butter, you're likely to have a richer dish.
There, chefs baste the meat with Devonshire Butter, like you would a turkey on Thanksgiving day. You don't have to babysit the meat on the grill like that to take the technique to the next level, though.
The biggest difference in Kerrygold butter starts with the milk. The milk that is used to produce this butter is from cows that eat grass. A more natural diet, produce a better milk, and then better butter. Grass-fed milk has a richer taste and is creamier, thus why Kerrygold butter has a richer flavor.
The American fascination with Irish butter may only have been spurred a few decades ago, but love for the Emerald Isle's deep, velvety butter is nothing new.
What is the best butter to use? Salted and organic butter is literally the best butter that you can use. It is the salt that really makes this the best buttercream frosting ever. It's actually a myth that salted butter is an inferior quality – it's not.
One trick is to know that you can make fluffy buttercream with both salted and unsalted Lurpak® – it's your choice. Put your mark on it, cook. If you choose to use unsalted butter in your buttercream, add a little salt when making the buttercream.
Unsalted butter gives you complete control of the overall flavor of your recipe. This is especially important in certain baked goods where the pure, sweet cream flavor of butter is key (butter cookies or pound cakes). As it pertains to cooking, unsalted butter lets the real, natural flavor of your foods come through.
Before You Start
Attempting to spread frosting onto warm cake layers is a recipe for sloppy disaster. Chill your cake layers for at least 2 hours, or better, overnight. If you've made your frosting ahead, make sure it's at room temperature before you start.
Is milk or heavy cream better for buttercream?
Using heavy whipping cream instead of milk and beating it for several minutes is the secret to super fluffy, silky smooth buttercream. The reason is simple: Beating cream allows you to incorporate some air into the buttercream.
Too much whipping can leave air bubbles in your buttercream frosting. It's a minor problem and won't ruin the flavour or texture, but it may not look as pretty when it comes to decorating. Don't leave your buttercream frosting whipping forever and ever if you don't want air bubbles.
SHOULD I USE SALTED OR UNSALTED BUTTER FOR ICING? Choose unsalted butter for a celebration cake. Salted is good for cupcakes.
SWISS MERINGUE BUTTERCREAM
SM buttercream is arguably the best frosting in terms of cake decorating because it is the easiest way to get those smooth clean lines.
American Buttercream
American buttercream frosting is the easiest and most common buttercream frosting—and the quickest to make. It's often used in a piping bag for decorating cakes. Plus, it's the sturdiest option for writing on a cake.
Swiss meringue buttercream is easier to prepare, but does it taste as good? That's a personal preference. To me, the two frostings taste almost identical. However, I find the Italian meringue frosting to be a bit easier to work with and the Swiss meringue frosting to be a tad bit lighter.
Swiss Meringue is a lot easier to make, since it's not as involved as Italian meringue. So if you want a quick delicious frosting, then Swiss meringue is the buttercream that you'll want to make.
To create a stiff consistency buttercream, add powdered sugar to your batch of buttercream, 2-3 Tablespoons at a time, until the desired consistency is reached. You can add as much powdered sugar as you'd like depending on how thick you want the buttercream.
For a rich and creamy flavor in your frosting, butter is key. We suggest using a good-quality unsalted butter for tasty results every time. For those who want to use margarine instead, go for regular margarine rather than low-fat.
You can use salted or unsalted butter and opinions are divided on which is best. Many recipes for this icing suggest unsalted. However a little salt brings out the flavour so they then often add salt.
What happens if you use salted butter instead of unsalted butter?
When you cook, unlike when you bake, you can taste as you go – and in fact many savory recipes instruct you to “add salt to taste.” Thus if a recipe calls for unsalted butter, but you add salted instead, you will be able to taste the dish's saltiness and then add as little, or as much, extra salt as you would like.
Unsalted butter gives you complete control of the overall flavor of your recipe. This is especially important in certain baked goods where the pure, sweet cream flavor of butter is key (butter cookies or pound cakes). As it pertains to cooking, unsalted butter lets the real, natural flavor of your foods come through.
You know baking is all about science, but it's all about control as well. When you use unsalted butter in a recipe, you can control the exact amount of salt in your baked good. When you use salted butter, you have no idea how much salt you're using because it varies between each brand you see at the store.
American buttercream is nothing but powdered sugar moistened with butter. That kind of simplicity makes it quick and easy, but it also means that American buttercream tends to have a tooth-aching sweetness and density.
Sift the Sugar
The lumps in the sugar will give the buttercream a gritty texture. They can also deflate the buttercream as it mixes- not fluffy! To prevent the powdered sugar lumps, all you need to do is sift the sugar before adding it into the buttercream. The sifted sugar will be light and airy itself, lump free!
- Add a pinch of salt.
- Add flavoring.
- Add whipped cream.
- Add in cream cheese for a lighter flavor.
- Whip the frosting.
- Add textures.
- Add freeze-dried ground-up fruit to add flavor.
Now you know that unsalted butter with high-fat content is your best option for baking cakes.
You can also use half shortening in your buttercream to make it more stable and less likely to melt.
One question I get asked all the time is whether it is acceptable to use salted butter in baking, since most recipes either don't specify salted or unsalted, or explicitly recommended unsalted butter. The simple answer is that yes, it is fine to use salted butter in baking.
Salt helps cut the sweet flavor as well. Don't add so much that it tastes salty, just enough to balance out the sugar. Start with just a pinch at a time and taste as you go. Adding too much can quickly take it from making it better to making it worse in a hurry!