You’ve heard it before: In baking, precision matters. But precision means more than just making sure your flour and baking soda are accurately measured. “How you prepare your ingredients is just as important as how you measure your ingredients,” says Shauna Sever, author of Midwest Made: Big, Bold Baking from the Heartland. Luckily, most recipes provide a few preparation guidelines—you know, like when they call for using room-temperature eggs or softened butter.
I’m usually the first person to remind you that you’re in charge, and that you don’t have to listen to anyone besides yourself. But if there ever is a time to follow someone else’s rules, it’s when you’re baking. You're mixing liquids and solids in a way that’s kind of architectural, capturing air to transform a mixture of disparate ingredients into a towering cake or a sheet of chewy-crispy cookies. Everything has to work together just so to achieve the perfect outcome.
And it turns out, ingredient temperature plays an important role in developing proper structure in many baked goods. Using room-temperature eggs, fat, and liquid, emphasizes Sever, is “the key in achieving a nice, velvety batter.” This is especially true when it comes to butter. When you beat room-temperature butter with sugar until the mixture becomes light and fluffy—this is called the creaming method—the sugar is able to perforate the butter and create tiny pockets of air. You’ll simultaneously get an even texture and more volume. (Just remember that room temperature is generally around 70 degrees, so be mindful of the temperature in your kitchen.)
“Soft but cool butter has a nice, creamy texture that makes it easy to beat with sugar, which incorporates air into batters and doughs that rely on the creaming method,” says Stella Parks, author of BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts. In turn, she explains, “this air keeps cookies thick, rather than spreading out flat.” And in cakes? “It helps them rise up fluffy and light.”
What happens when you use butter straight from the fridge? It’ll be stiff and difficult to beat—and you’ll end up with fragments in your dough. (Even in recipes that call for cold butter, like pie dough, it's possible for the butter to be too cold. Parks says super cold butter can make pie doughs dry and crumbly, leading bakers to compensate with more water—which increases gluten development, as well as the chances that the pie crust will shrink unattractively in the oven and turn out tough.) “Unless you're a more proficient baker than the person who wrote the recipe, you should always follow the directions,” Parks recommends.
