The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Laminating with Salted Butter

zachyahoo's picture
zachyahoo

Laminating with Salted Butter

I'm in the process of making pain au chocolat (chocolate croissants) and just ran into a problem.
The Kerrygold butter that my parents picked up for me while they were in town is salted- I started the lamination process without knowing this.

Anyone have any experience laminating with a salted butter? It's typically.. not recommended

Really hoping that the saltiness of the pastry ends up complementing the semi-sweet chocolate --

Maybe I should add some other sweet element at the end to help counteract the saltiness?

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

(although semi sweet chocolate sometimes benefits from a little salt) and use for a savoury meat dish instead or stuff with meat or pumpkin.  Taste the dough and you will know.  

You can also complete the laminating, roll up in parchment paper and plastic and freeze for later use.  Be sure to label that it's salted.  

Ford's picture
Ford

A quarter pound of salted butter contains 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of table salt.  If you use a stick of salted butter instead of unsalted butter, just reduce the added salt by 1/4 to 1/2 tspn.  The salt will not interfere with the lamination process.  If it is already done, then you obviously cannot undo it.  Just hope it is not too salty.

Ford

deblacksmith's picture
deblacksmith

One of my greatest complains about both cooking and baking recipes is the forever it seems push to use unsalted butter.

Not much salt in most salted butter – about 1.8 grams in a 114 gram (1/4 pound) stick.  So you can adjust the salt in your bread if you are using salted butter – remembering that the norm for bread is 2 percent salt of the weight of flour.

Often repeated but I consider it pure bull is that unsalted butter is “fresher”.  Look at the dates on the salted and unsalted butter – in almost all cases they will be the same or within a few days of each other.

We like salted butter on the table, so we use salted butter in cooking.  In my family’s farm kitchen they made their own butter – and always salted it.  (They had real cream for breakfast too - Grandma lived to 101.)

YMMV     deblacksmith

ds99302's picture
ds99302

I always use salted butter in my croissants and pastries.  The one time I tried using unsalted butter, they just didn't taste as good.  Also, the ingredients in salted butter say cream snd salt.  When I look at a package of unsalted butter it says cream and natural flavoring.  I don't want flavoring in my butter.  I think it makes it taste like that fakey microwave popcorn butter.  If salted butter is cream and salt, then unsalted butter should be just cream.  Of course I've only looked at regular supermarket brands of butter.  I haven't looked at the gourmet brands of butter to see what's in them.

zachyahoo's picture
zachyahoo

I've never seen "natural flavoring" on any ingredients list for any brand of butter.

You definitely can't make a generalization that unsalted butter is "less natural" than salted.

ds99302's picture
ds99302

Nowhere in my post did I say unsalted butter was less natural than salted butter.  i don't know where you got that from.