Shortening = butter?

[Groggy]

If a recipe call for shortening...is that like crisco? Can you use butter instead?? THis would be for a cookie recipe.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I'm not a very good cook!

[NMDemDist2]

1. Crisco = shortening as far as using butter you can, but the texture will

change just a bit. For cookies it should be fine and make the cookies taste richer :)

[Stinky The Clown]

2. Shortening, as you've posed the question, is probably as AzDem says ......

........ Crisco.

But "shortening" is almost anything that bonds to the the gluten strands in developed dough, effectively "shortening" them. Different shortenings meet different needs and give different results. Generally, shortenings are all a type of fat.

Solid, like Crisco, butter, margarine, and similar commercial products

Liquid, like any of the many oils out there.

Use common sense. For example, while cookies could be made with, say, olive oil, who would eat them? Pie crust made with lard is simply better than with crisco (designed originally to be the synthetic/lower cost alternative to lard). You might also want to mix shartenings to get the best of two different ones. I make an Italian pastry to uses a 50-50 mixture of butter and lard to give excellent baking/layer separation while having the butter flavor.

Keep in mind that baking, much more so than general cooking, is much more strict science. (In professional food prep, cooked foods have recipes, baking has "formulae") Do a little research in this area. Its interesting and your baking will be lots better.

[Eurobabe]

3. shortening = hydrogenated soybean oil SHORTENING your life

think transfat, hardening arteries, etc. I hate it and avoid at all costs.

Lately I have taken to using coconut oil as a substitute for shortening, but anything that can have butter substituted - gets that instead.

[wryter2000]

4. I would definitely use butter instead

In a cookie, the flavor would be much superior. For another recipe that involves very high heat, you wouldn't use butter because it would burn. But for cookies -- butter.

[The empressof all]

5. It depends

Somethings are better with butter-some are not. Personally I think pie crusts need to be made with lard to get a really great result. You would never make a pie crust with butter.

In cookies you will get different results with different kinds of fat. Butter flavored Crisco will give you a better chocolate chip cookie IMHO than butter. (I like the softer, chewer kind of CCC) My sister swears that her butter cookies are better with a half and half ratio of butter to margarine. (It's all a matter of taste)

I tend to avoid commercially processed fats like solid shortenings and margarines and stick to butter and the occasional lard crust.

[Dora]

6. You'll have a different result with butter.

If you substitute butter for shortening, the cookies will spread more. If the recipe calls for shortening, it's calling for a fat that's solid at room temp, and butter is a little bit softer than that.

I agree with the other posters here that Crisco and other solid shortenings are quite bad for your health, and a Great ALTERNATIVE to Crisco is palm oil shortening. The brand that's available where I live is Imagine, and it comes in a container that's similar to a Cool-Whip container, and I find it in the fats section of my grocery store. It won't be easily found in most mainstream groceries unless they have a lot of organics/health food items. If you have a food co-op where you live, they should carry it.

(This is the second thread I've posted on with info about Imagine. Sorry to those who may think I'm getting boring!)