What is the difference in using salted and un-salted butter in recipes?
Apart from the salt content, there is a difference between salted and unsalted butter. Salted butter tends to also have water added to it, so can affect the shortness of your pastry (i.e. make it tougher), but really only when you get into the complicated stuff like making puff pastry from scratch (in which case, you should use unsalted). If making plain ol’ shortcrust, use salted butter. Salt heightens the flavour of both savoury and sweet dishes, but unsalted is nicer for cake baking as you can control the flavour and add a pinch of salt yourself. For buttercreams and icings, I’d go with unsalted too. That said, you can use a salted butter for both, but I’d definitely use the ‘slightly salted’ variety – I made a cake with just ‘salted’ the other day and it was actually pretty salty. Another option is that you could buy unsalted, and then mash in a little salt when you need to use it for day to day stuff…
