It was a night I will never forget. After a round of pretzels, spaetzle and schnitzel, my friend Amanda Hesser, CEO of the website Food52, shared a disturbing discovery: For years, her mother, Judith, had baked with salted butter.
I nearly choked on my bratwurst.
People who write about food or cook professionally wouldn’t dream of using the salty kind in our sweets and, since most of us don’t bother to keep it around at all, in our savory food, either. Why not? Conventional wisdom says we should use only unsalted butter so we can control the salt, adding it separately.
Since that dinner in 2014, as I flipped through so many new cookbooks full of flaky salt-sprinkled brownies and observed fancy restaurants offer two types of butter — one with salt, one without — with their bread, I thought back to Hesser’s disclosure. It wasn’t until a few months ago, when cookbook author Alison Roman’s recipe for salted butter and chocolate chunk shortbread went viral, that I began to investigate the state, past and present, of what I once presumed the “other” butter.
Those of us who have made a big deal about salting our sweets in recent years have assumed that our predecessors liked saccharine desserts, but Hesser’s theory is that the ingredient had been excluded from old recipes because it was already incorporated into the butter.