What happens if you substitute margarine for butter

It's one thing to spread a little margarine on a piece of toast or melt some to pour over popcorn. But when you're baking, butter triumphs over margarine every time. For cakes, cookies, and pastries, butter unsalted, that is provides richer flavor.

It begins as cream, after all, and margarine is made from vegetable oil. Butter's high fat content is also what gives baked goods their texture. When can I use margarine instead of butter? For cakes, cookies, and pastries, butter unsalted, that is provides richer flavor. Butter is also the better choice for frying. Margarine is an unsaturated butter substitute made with at least 80 percent fat by weight and flavoring from dairy products. Most margarine uses vegetable oils made from soybeans, cottonseed and corn.

Soft spread margarine in tubs is not recommended for baking because it has more water and less fat. The short answer is while there is no exact rule for substituting the fats in your recipes, it's likely you'll be able to use butter or shortening as a one-to-one swap for margarine. In addition to butter, we're sharing some easy and healthier swaps for when you need a margarine substitute stat. While oil proves moisture to a lot of baking recipes we're looking at you, olive oil cake! For example, you want to be able to cream your butter and sugar together in order to get your chocolate chip cookies to come out at the perfect texture.

For this reason, cooking oils such as vegetable or canola are not recommended substitutes for margarine. Beyond the texture, a key difference between tub margarine and butter is that the former tends to be lower in saturated fats and higher in water.

These days, companies have developed many different types of margarine for various dietary needs — low-sodium, low-fat, dairy-free, olive oil, vegan — just to name a few. Virtually all tub margarines are trans-fat free, but check the label for verification.

Tub margarine can easily be substituted for butter at the table for spreading, and some people use it on the stovetop for cooking, though we typically favour using oil over margarine in cases like this. In baking, melted margarine could work in recipes that call for melted butter, but in recipes that call for softened butter, swapping in tub margarine may change the texture; for example, cakes will be less tender, and cookies will generally spread out more and be less crisp.