Margarine
A category rather than a substance — plant fat and water emulsified to imitate butter, and how well it imitates butter depends almost entirely on the ratio.
Also called butter vs margarine (INTERNATIONAL); baking margarine (UK); hard margarine (UK); spread (UK) — A legal distinction as well as a practical one: products below a threshold fat content cannot be sold as margarine in some jurisdictions and are labelled as spreads.
Margarine is a water-in-oil emulsion of plant fats made to be used where butter would be. Treating it as one invariant substance is the commonest mistake made about it, and it is why the same advice about margarine is both true and false depending on the tub.
FAT CONTENT is the variable that matters. Hard baking margarines are formulated near butter’s fat level and behave close to it. Soft spreads carry considerably more water and less fat, and that water is the source of most margarine baking failures: it hydrates the flour and develops gluten in shortcrust and rubbed-in mixtures whose method exists to prevent exactly that.
MELTING BEHAVIOUR is the second. Butter is plastic across a useful range, which is what creaming and lamination exploit. Margarines vary — some are formulated with a wider plastic range than butter specifically for pastry work, and soft spreads have almost none.
FLAVOUR is the third and the least mechanical. Butter’s flavour comes partly from milk solids that brown; margarine has none, so it browns less and tastes flatter, and no formulation changes that.
BakeHQ takes no position on which is better and makes no health claim in either direction.
What changes if it is left out
Butter substitutes for a hard baking margarine closely, gaining flavour and browning. Going the other way depends entirely on which margarine: a hard block is a reasonable swap, and a soft spread in a pastry is not.
Follows from the fat and water functions recorded here and from the butter record, which carries its own composition claim.
RecordedFollows from evidence recorded elsewhere on BakeHQ
Related
What it does
Gluten inhibition
A fat is a fat for this purpose. This is the function that transfers most reliably from butter, whatever the fat content of the tub.
Aeration
Creaming works from a hard block and poorly from a soft spread, because the plastic range differs enormously across the category.
Hydration
THE SAME RULING AS BUTTER AND VEGAN BLOCK FAT. The water is real and is the source of most margarine pastry failures, and nothing is ever hydrated with a block of fat.
Compared in
A subject of the comparison, so it is reachable from the record a reader is more likely to land on first.
Vegan block butter vs margarine
One side of the comparison.
Covered in
Choosing a fat, and substituting one honestly
The guide’s standing warning that a category is not a substance applies here more than anywhere else in the fat section.