When Do Butter and Eggs Need to Be at Room Temperature?
The most successful bakers are the most methodical and least impulsive, at least they have learned to channel their impulsiveness into other pursuits. Baking requires a little foresight, tiny planning, and a little patience. Baking requires certain ingredients to be at a specific temperature before they are even mixed into the batter, and there is no way to go about it.
When you see a recipe for which eggs and butter should be at room temperature (ideally around 65-70 ℉), you should listen. Although I have a big question: “Don’t tell me what to do!” strip, this is when you should heed the (baking) authorities. But knowing why you should do something increases the likelihood that you will actually do it, so let’s take a look at that.
You Can’t Drain Cold Oil
“Cream” is a combination of butter, sugar, and (sometimes) baking powder until the mixture is light and fluffy. According to the queen of practical baking, Stella Parks , a temperature of 65 ℉ is best for achieving proper aeration, which gives the mixture a light and fluffy look and texture. Cold butter, heavy, soft, or partially melted butter won’t give you the results you want:
At higher temperatures, the oil loses its plasticity, making it too soft and soft to fold over and trap air. Without these air bubbles, the butter and sugar form an ultra-dense paste that gives the cakes a wet brick texture. But with cool ingredients and a little patience, the butter and sugar will really get “fluffy and light” as most recipes suggest … This sets the stage for the cake to rise, creating a web of air cells that will later expand. steam and carbon dioxide in the oven.
There are several ways to slightly heat the butter, but the easiest is to remove it from the refrigerator about an hour before baking (chop it into smaller pieces to speed up the process). If you can poke it in and your finger won’t slip off the fat, you’re done.
Cold eggs can wipe out all your hard work.
It would be a shame if you make sure your butter is heated to the correct temperature and whisk it until it is a great fluffy state just to negate your cold egg work. Adding a cold ingredient to the fat at room temperature can cause the mixture to clot, causing the pieces of butter in the batter to solidify. Parks explained why this is a problem in an interview with Epicurious :
“The curd dough for the cake usually does not rise well, so the finished cake will be quite dense,” says Parks. “Cold curd doughs tend to take shape rather than burn, and they are often riddled with tunnels and holes.”
The goal is to create a creamy, velvety emulsion and make sure all of your ingredients are at the same temperature to help you achieve this. Fortunately, eggs are very easy to reheat. Just place them in a bowl of hot tap water for a minute or two.
What about meringues?
Meringues in their simplest form are egg whites that are beaten with sugar until they hold their shape. This mixture is usually baked, but can also be used for icing. Most meringue recipes do not specify the temperature of the egg whites, and this is because there is a strong case for both cold proteins and room temperature proteins.
Egg whites whisk more easily at room temperature. Warm proteins decompose more easily than cold ones, and then reunite to form a loose, bulky structure with large air pockets between the proteins. You will get more volume in a shorter time, but the structure of your meringue will be less stable.
Colder whites require more effort. The proteins are denser and less easy to unfold, which means that the resulting meringue consists of a network of small air pockets trapped between a tighter network of proteins, making it more stable.
I’ve always used cold egg whites (and a standing mixer) when making meringues, but there are many bakers who prefer room temperature whites, so try both and see which one works best for you. (If you are beating eggs by hand, use room temperature. Otherwise, you will need to beat eggs for a very long time.)
Separate while it’s cold
There is one case where cold eggs are always preferable: when you are trying to separate the yolk from the white . A cold yolk is a hard yolk that is less likely to break, so for best results, separate it directly from the refrigerator and then let the yolks warm if necessary (and save the whites for shakes if you’re not using them).