If you take the three main types of fats used for puff pastry. Lard, butter and margarine, can they be used interchangeable or is there caveats between the three? I found a nice recipe for puff pastry that uses butter but I want to use marge for a vegan option.
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1 Answer
Apart from flavour, the two main issues you might encounter when substituting margarine for butter are:
- Different fat content. There are margarines explicitly produced and marketed as low-fat options. For baking, you do not want these. As butter usually/always (depending on your location) has a fat content of 80%, you want to substitute an ingredient with a similar makeup.
- Different kinds of fat. Margarine is made with vegetable oils, which contain less saturated fats than butter does. As a rule, saturated fats are more solid than unsaturated fats at the same temperature, which might lead to more 'melting' when substituting margarine for butter. However, margarine contains stabilisers making it more or less behave like butter; it is hard to predict how these will behave when baking, though.
You will probably be fine substituting full-fat margarine for butter, but if you want to err on the side of caution, my advice would be to look for a recipe that uses margarine.
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1Also butter varies in fat content: American butter is about 80% butter fat, European butter between 82% and 84%. Lard is 100% fat, about 40% saturated. Lard is recommended for short crumbly pastries: having no water minimizes gluten development. (But one may need to add more liquid to get the dough to come together.) Of course lard is not an acceptable substitute for butter or margarine for vegeterians, and butter is not an acceptable substitute for margarine for vegans. Commented Jun 12, 2020 at 10:19
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@MarkWildon True, although the differences between different styles of butter are much smaller than the difference between low-fat and 'regular' margarine.– LSchoonCommented Jun 12, 2020 at 10:22