Reverse-Engineered Product: Vegan Butter Sticks
Let’s talk about the F word. We can start with the one that came to your mind first.
I posit that sound symbolism makes the quintessential F word so cathartic to say. You rev your respiratory engine while you sink your upper teeth into your lower lip. Then, you sustain a visceral vowel finalizing it with a violent smack of your back tongue against your hard palate. This F word is aggressive allowing us to gnash our teeth, howl, and achieve primal release.
Yet there’s another, three-letter F word I try to avoid in my posts. It starts similarly by sinking your upper teeth into your lower lip, but then: Ahhh! The only vowel suggests horror just before a T taps it off with a kind of, “Tsk, tsk.”
The sound symbolism in this shorter F-word is inherently insulting. Often, I can say “oils”, “lipids” – even “hydrocarbon chains” – instead. Yet when dissecting the components of butter, nothing made as much practical sense as repeating saturated and unsaturated “fat”.
To anyone else shouldering a jagged relationship with this word, I’m sorry.
Table of Contents
Ingredients List
Logically, reverse engineering packaged foods begins with the ingredients list. Country Crock Dairy-Free Butter, my product review winner, contains:
- BLEND OF PLANT-BASED OILS (PALM FRUIT, PALM KERNEL AND CANOLA – and in some varieties, AVOCADO or OLIVE – OIL)
- WATER
- SALT (in some varieties)
- PEA PROTEIN
- GLUCOSE
- SUNFLOWER LECITHIN
- CITRIC ACID
- NATURAL FLAVORS
- BETA CAROTENE (COLOR)
Some of these ingredients, like canola oil and water, are easy to find. Most others can be ordered. However, I prefer to keep all my ingredients to “quick errand” status whenever I can. My copycat recipe thus relies on palm fruit shortening, canola oil, unsweetened plain soy or pea milk, aquafaba, and lemon juice. Dried ground turmeric and salt may be added as well.
Palm Fruit Shortening and Canola Oil
AKA palm fruit oil shortening, palm oil shortening, or simply palm shortening, this saturated fat is the bulk of both Country Crock and my homemade vegan butters. The easiest one for me to source is from Spectrum Organics which may be at your local Walmart and/or Whole Foods.
I have yet to try a multi-ingredient, all-vegetable shortening such as Crisco in my formula. When I do, I’ll be sure to update my findings! Stick with all-palm fruit shortening until then.
Canola oil completes my homecrafted blend of plant-based oils. It was an obvious choice from the prototype’s ingredients list! Less obvious was what to do about palm kernel oil. As a largely commercial ingredient, very few stores carry it. I ultimately omitted it; trying to replace it yielded a slightly broken emulsion at best.
Unsweetened Plain Soy or Pea Milk, Aquafaba, and Lemon Juice
This trifecta of ingredients covers water, pea protein, glucose, sunflower lecithin, citric acid, and natural flavors. Each contains water and glucose. Unsweetened plain soy milk (or pea milk if you can find it) also covers pea protein; aquafaba, sunflower lecithin; and lemon juice, citric acid.
The most curious of these substitutions may be aquafaba for sunflower lecithin – unless you consider both emulsify!
Dried Ground Turmeric and Salt
Like beta carotene from carrots, turmeric (from turmeric) is for color only. Yet while chemically unimportant, turmeric is crucial visually; whenever I forget it, I’m forced to serve sad, yellow-grey “butter”.
For recipes that lean on the taste of salted butter – such as my 3-Ingredient Vegan Sugar Cookies – add ¼ tsp (1.25 mL) kosher salt (or about half as much table salt) per homemade stick. Otherwise, skip it.
Packaging and Nutrition Facts
Culinary math is my favorite kind of math! In addition to considering the ingredients list, I study the numbers on the front and back packaging of foods I’m aiming to replicate. All Country Crock Dairy-Free Butters are 79% oil. In other words, for every 100 grams of product, there are 79 grams of fat.
But 100 grams is not a serving; 1 Tbsp (15 mL/14 g) is. To calculate how many grams of fat is in 1 Tbsp (15 mL/14 g), multiply 14 by .79.
Saturated and Unsaturated Fats
Unfortunately, “There are 11 grams of fat per 14-gram serving,” is less conclusion than milestone in my line of work. Some of those fats are saturated, unsaturated, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated…
But’s let’s pull back for a moment: Saturated fats are solid at room temperature; all others, liquid. Country Crock’s Nutrition Facts label reports 6 grams of saturated fat and 5 grams of various unsaturated fats per 14-gram serving. That confirms our 11-gram calculation!
Now, we look at proportions. 6/14 = x/100, and 5/14 = x/100. I therefore need 43 grams of saturated/solid fat (palm fruit shortening) and 36 grams of unsaturated/liquid fats (canola oil) per 100 g.
Nothing is ever so simple though. Palm fruit shortening is solid fat with some unsaturated fats; canola oil is liquid fat with some saturated fat. le sigh. Several pages of scratch work and countless tests later, I landed on 63 grams of palm fruit shortening and 16 grams of canola oil per 100-gram recipe. (63 + 16)/100 = 79%! You’re welcome.
Sodium
Each 14-gram serving of the salted varieties of Country Crock Dairy-Free Butter contains 110 mg of sodium. With 8 servings in a stick, each stick contains 880 mg.
The Nutrition Facts label on Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt (my go-to salt) reports 280 mg of sodium per ¼-tsp (1.25-mL/0.7-g). 880/280 = 3.14. In other words, each stick boasts a little less than 3 servings or ¾ tsp (3.75 mL/2.8 g) of Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt.
That math is logically incontestable! But practically speaking, it’s completely wrong; ¾ tsp (3.75 mL/2.8 g) – even ½ tsp (2.5 mL/1.4 g) – proved to be way too much.
Practical Applications
No equations matter if the resulting product doesn’t taste or bake well. ¾ tsp (3.75 mL/2.8 g) kosher salt isn’t the only thing that failed during testing…
Refined Coconut Oil
At one point, I wanted to stiffen my vegan butter with cold-hard refined coconut oil. I carefully calculated the range of grams I could successfully add. Yet even when I added the least amount (20 grams), I made grainy “butter”.
My emulsifying technique was fine! The problem emerged in my refrigerator; since coconut oil hardens faster than palm fruit oil, it crystallized in an unsightly way that reminded me of the fat granules in conventional salami.
Bake Test
All this mathing and experimenting is for naught if I can’t make cookies! Thankfully, in the end, I created my favorite vegan butter.
I still buy Country Crock Dairy-Free Butters when I need to save time. But my baked goods are more golden and smoother with my reverse-engineered version of their product. It’s definitely worth making a triple batch!
Reverse-Engineered Product: Vegan Butter Sticks
Description
In addition to some basic equipment, you’ll need a food scale, an immersion blender, and a tall and narrow vessel. Consider reading this entire post to learn why the amount of each ingredient is so specific.
Secondly, plan to make 1-3 sticks; the vortex of a typical home immersion blender is too strong for less than one, too weak for more than three. And tests with my high speed blender and food processor were entirely unsuccessful.
To make the equivalent of one packaged stick, follow the 120-g recipe. Add a single or double batch of the 113-g recipe as desired.
Ingredients
Base 100-g Recipe – for reference only
Scaled 120-g Recipe – for 1, 113-g stick accounting for product loss during vessel transfers
Scaled 113-g Recipe – for 1 or 2 more 113-g stick(s)
Instructions
- Select and prepare “butter” mold(s). Make refrigerator space for this setup.
- Melt shortening in a small saucepan over low heat, then remove from burner and cool to room temperature.
- Meanwhile, measure other ingredients into a tall and narrow vessel.
- Add melted and cooled shortening to vessel. With an immersion blender, briefly blend about 10-15 sec, until uniformly opaque.
- Transfer “butter” to prepared mold(s), then refrigerate about 6 hrs or overnight.
- Use or wrap in parchment and seal in an airtight container. Refrigerate up to 3 wks, or freeze up to 3 mos.
Almost anything can be a “butter” mold! Support silicone molds or pans with a baking sheet; line anything else such as loaf pans or ramekins with parchment.
Notes
- From here, the possibilities are endless: pies, tarts, cookies, etc…
- You may also wish to make my reverse-engineered egg replacer.
- Checkout my other reverse-engineered products!
