Hailey Bieber Butters Her Cookie Dough and We’re Honestly Shook
But is there some sound to her logic? Here’s what our test kitchen had to say.
Facebook // Justin Bieber
Watching Justin and Hailey Bieber bake gluten-free triple chocolate chunk cookies (because Justin, in case you didn’t know, adheres to a gluten-free diet) in the most recent episode of their Facebook Watch series, The Biebers on Watch, may conjure all sorts of feelings. We won’t speculate on the particulars of your emotional response. But for us, around the 6:32 mark of the eight-minute video, we were overcome with a feeling that crowded out all others: complete and utter confusion.
Because… I mean… why on Earth is Hailey buttering the cookie dough – methodically dabbing a pat of softened butter onto each cookie on the baking sheet? Prior to getting her butter knife out, Hailey confesses that one thing she likes to do with cookies is “put butter on the top so that the butter bakes into it.” She adds, “Don’t critique me, you people who are bakers.”
But are we missing something? Does buttering cookie dough have some technical culinary sound to it?
“It’s not traditional to put softened butter on top of unbaked cookies,” Amanda Neal, a recipe developer in the Food Network test kitchens, reassures us. “Butter is almost always brought to room temperature then beaten into the sugar. It's also sometimes melted and stirred into the batter for a crisper cookie. I'm honestly surprised the cookies aren't greasy on top!”
To be clear, Mrs. Biebs also put butter in the cookie batter itself, creaming it with sugar in her mixer, which Amanda says is “the best method for incorporating butter into cookies because it adds air into the butter while the sugar helps to hold the air in, providing great structure for your cookies.”
So, bottom line, butter on batter is definitely just a Hailey quirk. But hey – maybe we shouldn’t knock it until we try it!
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