Herman asked:
>>>>>>>>>>Why do some recipes call for unsalted butter then add salt? Is
there a reason or is this just left over from the time people churned the
milk to get butter?
It might well be an old-fashioned thing, if it is, there may be a good
explanation for it:
Different brands of butter contain vastly different amounts of salt, so the
taste of your bread is different for different brands of butter. My folks
notice the difference in the saltiness of bread more than I do.
Unsalted butter has shorter shelf life--so I prefer salted butter. Too
keep my bread fairly consisted, I use a particular brand of irish butter,
and, when that is not available, I use a certain New Zealand brand.
To add my comments to the scale thing:
Weighing when baking does have many advantages. Specially when you are
making, let's say, 4 loaves of bread--and the pesky recipe calls for you to
"spoon" the flour into the cup. I wish American authors would stop stop
spooning flour and start writing their recipes with scooped flour--
Madeleine Kamman did it in "The New Making of a Cook".
So, it is nice to convert 1 lb. of flour into 4 lbs. of flour.
But, I do not see any incredible advantage of the metric system over the
imperial system. In the metric system, you multiply and divide by ten--
good. In the imperial system, well, you multiply and divide by four--even
better, easier to halve things than to get 3/5 of things.
I grew up with the metric system, and it was difficult as an adult to adapt
to the imperial system. I really like modern british baking books because
they present both metric and imperial measurements. Rose does the same in
The Cake Bible.
And, 1 oz. of water weighs 1oz. so, even the water issue is resolved in the
imperial system.
Later,
Jazzbel