Browned butter is alluring. Its rich, nutty, butterscotch-y flavors can easily lean sweet or savory. It can act as a charming finishing drizzle—as it does in these Mashed Potatoes with Herbed Browned Butter—or as a sauce in something like our Fresh Egg Pasta with Browned Butter and Hazelnuts. It seems to elevate everything it touches. But what about baked goods? While you can always mix some browned butter into an elegant bowl of pasta or your favorite mashed spuds, the same isn’t necessarily true in baking.

What happens when you brown butter

Butter doesn’t have too much going on inside. It’s 80% to 84% milk fat, with 14% to 18% water. Anything left over is milk solids, with perhaps a touch of salt. In its solid form, butter is perfectly emulsified, smooth and golden. When you melt it down, that emulsification breaks. Take it a step farther and the butter will vigorously bubble, and after a few minutes the water will evaporate away. The fat will quiet down and little specks of milk solids will settle on the bottom of the pan. Continue cooking and those specks will toast, starting at a light cork color and taking on a deep shade of umber. Every shade of brown is an extra bump of flavor.

When browned butter works (and when it doesn’t)

Some folks don’t bother with baking, which is completely understandable, given how particular and finicky some baking techniques can be. Butter manipulation is one of the biggest hurdles, because that balance of fat and water can be critical to the structure of a given baked good. Evaporate all the water out of a stick of butter and you could be sacrificing structure for that sexy browned butter flavor.

There are some general guidelines: Don’t sub in browned butter for whole butter when your recipe features flakey layers, like in puff pastry, biscuits, or croissant dough. In those recipes, the water evaporates and leaves behind an air pocket, making it essential for lamination. Similarly, cookie recipes that rely on the moisture from butter don’t perform well if you swap in browned butter. Using browned butter for my favorite pecan shortbread cookie sure sounded good in theory, but it rendered the cookies tough. They weren't ruined, but the fat didn’t release any steam, so the texture was nowhere near as tender and crumbly as it should have been. I would have gotten similar results using oil or shortening.

But here’s the good news: Recipes that do call for pure fats—like oil or shortening—are likely good candidates for browned butter swaps. Southern cornbread recipes commonly use bacon grease, lard, or shortening, so we developed a Browned Butter Skillet Cornbread that’s crisp and tender, and features that toasty browned butter flavor. Recipes that have other hydrating ingredients (cakes with batters that are rich in eggs, milk, bananas, or water) aren’t as reliant on the water from butter and can probably handle a browned butter exchange. Our Browned Butter Madeleines and Browned Butter Gâteau Magique certainly can.

Spotlight its delicate flavor

Butter, once freshly browned in the pan, has an almost mesmerizing aroma that blossoms and fills the kitchen. While it’s strong in the pan, once mixed into a batter, the flavor is actually quite delicate. Browned butter is best used as the main flavoring agent, like in the pasta or cornbread I mentioned above, or to compliment one other element, like cinnamon, nuts, or maybe chocolate. If too many powerful players enter the mix, it can fade away.

You can start your browned butter experiments as soon as you like—as long as you know the flavor will shine through, and as long as that 16% water content isn’t critical to the recipe. Of course, that’s not always easy to know, which is why we’d recommend using recipes that have already been developed and tested for browned butter. Our Salted Honey and Browned Butter Bars or our Browned Butter and Coconut Loaf Cake are great places to start.

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Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Allie Chantorn Reinmann is a Digital Staff Writer for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. She’s a Thai-American chef who earned her diploma for Pastry and Baking Arts at The Institute of Culinary Education and worked professionally for over a decade honing her craft in New York City at places like Balthazar, Bien Cuit, The Chocolate Room, Billy’s Bakery and Whole Foods. Allie took her know-how from the kitchen to the internet, writing about food full-time at Lifehacker for three years and starting her own YouTube channel, ThaiNYbites. You can find her whipping up baked goods for cafés around Brooklyn, building wedding cakes and trying her hand (feet?) at marathon running. She’s working on her debut cookbook and lives in Brooklyn, NY.