Substitutes for butter: What can you use if you don’t have butter?

Whether it is the price of butter or an actual shortage, you might be looking for alternatives to butter in your Thanksgiving baking and cooking. And this is especially true if you actually find yourself running out of butter in the middle of the preparations.

In order to get the best answer for our readers, we had the opportunity to chat with a Culinary Expert for The Kitchens of Betty Crocker/General Mills, Meredith Deeds (she helped to test the recipe for Peanut Butter Blossoms that was one of the most viewed recipes for the brand during the 2021 holiday season!). During our chat we mostly focused on what to use as a butter substitute when it comes to baking, but we also touched on what to use when it comes to those savory dishes too.

It was actually interesting to really dive into how one would replace butter in a recipe and what you need to pay attention to when it comes to the recipes we love.

What can you substitute for butter in your recipes?

During the chat with Meredith, we learned that some of the ingredients we can use as an alternative to butter are (in baked goods and even in those savory dishes):

• Margarine
• Vegan Butter Sticks
• Refined Coconut Oil
• Shortening
• Vegetable Oil

But, just because we know what can be used, that doesn’t mean we can just throw in the coconut oil and call it a day. There are still things to pay attention to including whether or not it was supposed to be melted or not. This is where knowing your swaps is important.

According to Meredith,

"If you only had one option and I was only interested in swapping up butter, and I didn’t have any other dietary concern…so the funny thing about that is I might go with what we used to use all the time in place of butter and we stopped doing it and that’s margarine.There are a lot of margarines made today that are very close to butter in terms of fat content. And I think that this is the thing that we want to keep in mind when we’re substituting for butter. Butter is not 100% fat and I think that that’s surprising to a lot of people. So butter is between 80% and 83% butterfat typically and the rest is water and milk protein. So when we’re looking for things to substitute for butter, it’s great if we can find something that falls sort of in that same percentage.So we’re looking for something in the 80-ish percent range, and with margarine, not all margarines and you have to look for this, but particularly those that are sold in the stick form, and also vegan butter. Really vegan butter and margarine are often the same things. There are a lot of margarines that contain no animal proteins. Not all margarines are vegan, but many are naturally."

This means that it is important to know what you are adding to your recipe when doing a swap because you need to account for things like salt, water, and fat content of your substitute.

In fact when we talked about using vegetable oil as a substitute for butter, Meredith explained,

"The thing about swapping out for butter is it’s very dependent on the thing that you’re using it for. So if you’re looking for that to duplicate grandma’s perfectly flaky pie crust, you’re going to want something like vegan butter or margarine because it contains a little bit of water. So just like butter, butter contains water like I mentioned off the bat, and it’s that water in a pie crust that creates a little bit of steam and lifts the layers of flour in the pie crust. And that’s why we’re getting that flakiness. We’re getting lifting in the layers and it’s creating that flakiness that we expect in pie crust. So, vegan butter and margarine are good substitutes there.But if you’re making grandma’s pumpkin bread, for instance, I would use an oil for that because oil creates a very moist kind of cake situation. So quick breads, muffins, cakes – oil works, vegetable oil works perfectly. So if you find yourself in a situation where you have no butter it’s good to think about. Say you don’t have margarine but you have oil. It’s really good to think about well what are the things that oil is going to work really well with, as opposed to oh how do I make pie with oil? Maybe I make something that oil is naturally really good in such as cake."

After our chat with Meredith we realized that it is as much about knowing your recipes as it is your ingredients. And thanks to the Betty Crocker Kitchen, we have plenty of recipes we can check out if we need inspiration for desserts that can replace those pies or breads that we were planning to bake up.