This Anmol Industry blog’s third consecutive instalment focuses on fat in all its forms and how it contributes to baking. Although fat plays some more complex roles in how our baked goods rise, it is crucial for keeping baked goods soft and moist. Today, we’ll go over all of the functions of fats in baking as well as how they differ between solid and liquid forms.

How Fat Is Used in Baking?

Moisture, flavour, and richness
In keeping with the expertise of Anmol Industries, one of the leading cream biscuits manufacturers in India, fat’s primary function in baking is to give baked goods Moisture, flavour, and richness. Large amounts of fat give baked goods a more opulent texture and enhance their flavour. Simple as that.

Creates Tenderness
In baking, fat acts as a potent tenderizer. Fat coats flour to act as a barrier between the proteins and water, preventing the creation of gluten, as we discussed in the lesson on how gluten develops.

Additionally, fat actually shortens the gluten strands. This is why a yeast bread cooked with fat, like a cinnamon roll, is considerably more tender than a yeast bread made without fat, like a baguette.

Helps with Leavening
The baked goods’ leavening depends heavily on fat as well. When sugar and solid fat are creamed together, the web of air that is whipped into the mixture to raise and leaven our baked goods is supported.

A portion of the water in butter also evaporates as it is baked, giving the food loft. When creating puff pastry, this is quite obvious. Lamination, a technique for folding pastry that results in alternating layers of dough and butter, is used to make puff pastry. The layers of butter provide all of the leavening for the pastry.

Types of Fat
Liquid fats and solid fat are the two kinds of fat that are utilised in baking. Although solid fats can always be melted into liquid form, they do re-solidify when chilled, which causes them to behave slightly differently from real liquid fats.

Types of Solid Fats
We are about to discuss the three main types of solid fats used in baking. Besides, another solid fat that is becoming more and more popular in baking is coconut oil.

Butter
The most popular solid fat used in baking is butter because it gives baked goods a wonderful flavour and because the water in butter helps with leavening. About 80–82% of butter is fat.

Because margarine can include as low as 35% fat, which affects how it works quite differently from butter, it cannot be used as a direct substitute for butter. It is better to discover recipes that are developed expressly to be used with margarine if you do wish to use it in your baking.

Vegetable Shortening
A hydrogenated fat derived from vegetable oils is called vegetable shortening. Due to the fact that shortening is 100% fat, the baked goods it produces are even more tender than those made with butter and may also result in less shrinkage in the oven. Due to the water evaporating from the butter crust, a pie crust made entirely of shortening will shrink less than a pie crust made entirely of butter.

Around 118 F, vegetable shortening has a melting point that is higher than butter’s. Shortening causes less spreading in baked goods like cookies as a result. The cookie has time to set before the fat melts and spreads, which allows for this. The drawback of shortening is that it can create a very greasy mouthfeel, despite the fact that this can be desirable for making particularly thick cookies. Shortening does not melt in your mouth like butter does (melting point between 90 and 95F).

Lard
Up to the development of vegetable shortening in the middle of the 20th century, when lard was promoted as a less nutritious alternative, lard, which is rendered pig fat, was commonly utilised. Even though lard has a lower melting point and is preferred in baking because it is also 100% fat, it performs similarly to vegetable shortening in terms of functionality.

Note: Anmol Industries, a known name delivering Best Cream Biscuits In India, deals only in vegetarian products and hence lard is not used in any of our products. We included this in our list because it is widely used fat type outside India.

Coconut Oil
Because coconut oil is a solid fat with a very low melting point, it acts somewhere between solid and liquid fats. The lowest melting point of all the solid fats is that of coconut oil, which is around 76 F. However, it can be creamed with sugar and does solidify, therefore it belongs to the category of solid fat.

Types of Liquid Fats
Your oils are all liquid fats. Use a neutral-flavoured oil for baking, such as grapeseed, canola, or vegetable oil. Olive oil has a strong flavour and can be off-putting, thus it is not recommended for baking unless it is expressly asked for.

Since all oils are 100% fat, they all perform the same in baking. Liquid fats (oils), which serve primarily as an additive for richness and tenderness and do not solidify when cooled, result in baked goods that are more tender than those created with solid fats.

Oils are often not an effective replacement for solid fats because they do not solidify and so cannot assist in leavening. By melting them beforehand, all solid fats can be used in place of liquid fats. However, as the fat will solidify when cooled, the outcomes will be slightly different.

That is all for our fat related blog. Since we have covered all the three main ingredients – Flour, Sugar and Fat used in baking biscuits and cookies, we will move ahead with our series with a single blog that would focus on other minor ingredients that are equally important. So, stay tuned and wait for our next blog.