December 18, 2017 - 7:44am
Ankarsrum and cold butter - is it possible?
I have just invested in an Ankarsrum after many years of overwhelming my KA as it just can’t handle the volumes of my cookie and scone recipes (does anyone ever make a single recipe???). I hope I haven’t made a huge mistake! From what I’ve read, as long as the butter is soft, all is wonderful BUT what about my scones that need cold butter? I’m not going back to hand mixing scones so if the Ankarsrum can’t do it, the Ankarsrum may be going back to Sweden. I really want to love this tool!
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You say, "From what I’ve read … ." Have you actually tried the Ank? How did it fail? It's hard to fix something when the problem statement is that you've heard that it might not (by inference) work.
I've not had any trouble creaming cold butter or using cold butter in my bread. I haven't had scones good enough* to encourage me to make them for myself, so I can't speak to that in particular.
gary
* On the other hand, crumpets with jam or preserves and clotted cream are heavenly. ~g
I would probably use the roller instead of the beaters if I wanted to cream butter. I'd also find a way to keep the bowl relatively cool throughout the process. If I were using hard butter I'd present it into the mixer in pieces, and not as a whole stick or block.
Generally I work with softened butter but I certainly trust you skills and judgment.
Not that it will help with really large batches...
Instead of using a mixer (KA, Ank, Bosch, whatever), blitz the cold butter with the dry ingredients in a food processor. That will break the butter into small pieces without having it soften excessively. I suppose you could dump suceesive batches into a large bowl for combining with the wet ingredients, if that fits with your needs.
Paul
I've only tried this once, but it did a lovely job. I wanted to make leige waffles and didn't really know what I was doing but the recipe I had called for eggs and cold butter. I had sourdough starter that needed to be used up. So I put the sourdough in the Ank with the roller/scraper and put the eggs in and then cut the cold butter into small cubes (like 10mm cubes) and tossed them in one at a time - waiting for the first one to mix in before adding another. It was really easy and worked wonderfully.
Mine is 15 months old; still learning but love it after 30 years of KA. All the above suggestions are good. It may have been on the Ankarsrum blog that it mentions grating cold butter if you need to add it colder than room temp. Go to the Ank US website and call. Ashley is very helpful and lovely to talk to. I had a blog-related recipe question 2 weeks ago. She quickly figured it out and fixed the online recipe so it was accurate. Be careful using the whisks as the manual warns that cold butter could damage them. I've done pretty well cutting it small and using the roller.