Type Of Butter For Cookies

Our answer

In baking and cooking Nigella generally prefers to use unsalted butter as this allows the cook to control the amount of salt added to a dish. Traditionally also unsalted butter was fresher as salt acts as a preservative, though with modern refrigeration this is now less of an issue. For the Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies it is probably possible to use salted butter as the cookie recipe contains ½ teaspoon of salt and this would be roughly the same amount of salt as in 125g butter (usually the salt content in salted butter is approximately 2%). However for other baking we would always recommend using unsalted butter.

We have not tried the cookies with whole wheat flour and we suspect that they may be slightly dry as whole wheat flour absorbs more liquid than plain (all-purpose) flour. A combination of half plain and half whole wheat flours may give a slightly better result. You may also like to try Nigella's Triple Chocolate Buckwheat Cookies.