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I am likely to end up with a moderate amount of butter that has had the water boiled out (I’m making garlic confit and need something to do with the leftover butter). I’m thinking of trying to use it while baking something like bread, but I’m unsure of whether it’s safe to do a direct substitute for butter in a recipe.

It’s not fully clarified butter or ghee, since it hasn’t been strained, but I’m hesitant to call it browned butter as well. Regardless, it’s more or less devoid of any water content which I suspect will affect recipes sensitive to hydration.

Ideally I’m thinking of some sort of savory bread that usually involves olive oil or maybe experimenting with trying to make a savory brioche, but I’d like to figure out ahead of time if I’ll have to make any adjustments. This isn’t specifically asking about any one bread recipe, I’m looking for general rules of thumb when doing this substitution - I know one case it won’t work at all is for flaky pastries where you’re relying on the water content of the butter to produce steam, but that’s not relevant in this case.

Is it as simple as adding 25% (assuming 80/20 fat/water) of the weight of the butter as additional water to the recipe? Or is it more complicated than that, or other things I’m not thinking of?

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20% is the high end/legal limit for water content (in some places, at least) on calling it butter. 15-18% is possibly a better point to aim for, but other than that, yes, I'd add some water to get in that range if the recipe expects normal butter.

If the recipe is not melting the butter you might want to mix/blend/food-process the added water directly into the butter first so it behaves more like normal butter rather than just adding more water to the mix.

Another (too obvious?) alternative is to make the usual sort of "garlic bread" where bread (with no garlic) is cut and liberal butter and garlic applied. Butter previously used for your garlic confit would seem to go well with that approach, and it uses a fair amount, but it's not baking it into the bread as you asked.

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  • Does the presence or lack thereof of the milk solids/proteins make a difference? Raw vs cooked vs strained? I can imagine it mattering in some recipes, but does it matter for breads? Commented Aug 21 at 16:07
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    Gut feeling: The recommendatet percentage of butter in bread is 5-20% (the latter making for a very rich dough - brioche). So if we use 10% for the sake of the exercise, then the difference in water would be 1,5%. TBH., that’s a variation that wouldn’t bother me as a baker too much, that’s less than a tablespoon for a large loaf. Ballpark numbers. In my experience, I’m likely to adjust a bread dough “on the fly” anyway, depending on flour batch etc. Or the other way around, that should be within the range of tolerances. Commented Aug 21 at 16:32
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    @fyrepenguin Seems likely it will change the taste/flavor/flavour a bit, having been cooked. That's either good, bad, or indifferent depending on how you like the resulting taste. Given you said it was not strained/filtered, leaving the solids in is "more similar, but not the same" as regular butter - to my thinking. Commented Aug 21 at 16:43
  • @Stephie I find that both comforting and not - I’m quite bad at adjusting by feel, so that’s a mixed blessing. Commented Aug 21 at 16:45
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    @fyrepenguin unless you are doing something with very edgy ratios, most middle-of-the-range recipes will be just fine. Commented Aug 21 at 16:53
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I wouldn't do anything further. Just substitute the fat 1:1 by weight.

The subtle error here is treating chemistry like it's arithmetic. In reality, it doesn't work that way - butter is not fat+water, it is an emulsion of fat and water. If you throw clarified butter and water together, you don't get butter - but also, if you add both clarified butter and water to dough, you don't get the dough you would have gotten with butter.

Since butter is an emulsion, the water in it is "bound" to the fat. It's not freely available to mix with the other ingredients. If you do add water on top of clarified butter, this free water can suddenly go around creating gluten, watering down the dough, etc., which doesn't happen when you use butter. The results aren't what you want.

It's true that replacing butter with clarified butter, or lard, or some other water-free fat will give you a change in texture (and taste) and won't be equivalent to the original recipe. (Mostly, the texture of your dough will be shorter). But also adding water will take you even farther from the original, not closer.

Given that, when I have to substitute, I always just go for the same amount of fat and accept the different result. It usually still turns out quite tasty.

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