Butter

I use unsalted butter in the recipes here. All the recipes were tested with plain butter available at the supermarket. If you substitute butter with a higher fat content, you might get different results, especially in biscuit batters and pastry doughs. They will have a tendency to spread more and be highly fragile after baking. Butter is probably the most important ingredient in fine baking, so it needs to be fresh to be good. Unwrap a package of butter and scratch the surface with the point of a table knife. If the butter is lighter coloured on the inside than on the outside, it has oxidised and become stale. Such butter won’t impart anything but a stale flavour to whatever you bake with it. If you stock up on butter during a sale, by all means store it in the freezer. If you intend to keep it for more than a month or so, wrap the packages in clingfilm and foil to keep them as airtight as possible.