What Happens When You Bake Cookies With Salted Butter Instead Of Unsalted
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If you're ready to bake a batch of cookies but notice you only have salted butter in the fridge, don't fret. Go ahead and use salted butter to bake. The salt content in salted butter will not drastically change the texture and crumb structure of your cookies. After all, salt is merely a mineral that enhances flavor. It does not contain moisture, like sugar does, or protein like flour. Plus, it does not bind cookie dough together like eggs do. Go ahead and confidently bake cookies with salted butter, and you can trust me when I say this because I've baked more than a thousand cookies while developing the recipes in my latest cookbook, "108 Asian Cookies."
If your salted butter contains more water content than the unsalted butter you normally use for baking cookies, your cookies might spread just a bit more due to the extra water content. Again, though, it is not the salt content in the butter that affects the cookie's texture.
Another thing I must point out (even though it may be a little obvious): Salted butter will make cookies taste a bit salty and less sweet. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, considering how cloyingly sweet Western cookies are. If you're making not-too-sweet treats, like my salted egg yolk cookies or pho or ramen cookies, then it's totally fine to use salted butter instead of unsalted butter to bake them.
Salted butter tempers sweetness but beginner bakers may want to stick with unsalted butter
The salt content in salted butter can actually make cookies taste better. The extra salt can help balance and temper sweetness in cookies. Thus, when you use salted butter, you can scale back any salt or miso that you may normally add to cookie dough.
However, understandably, not everyone favors a pop of salinity when they're biting into a cookie. If you feel the saltiness will overpower the other flavors of your cookie, like a light and mild old-fashioned butter cookie or a vanilla shortbread, it might be best to make a trip to the grocery store or supermarket to grab unsalted butter for your baking needs instead.
When you bake cookies with salted butter, you're stuck working with the amount of salt that's in the butter, and that's something you can't change. The only way to control the saltiness of your cookies is to use less of the salted butter, or compensate with other flavors like matcha powder, Bourbon, or black sesame. So while it is totally fine to bake with salted butter, folks new to baking may want to experiment with it first or stick to unsalted butter when making their first batches of cookies.