wrote in message >...
> OK, as you may have gathered from other questions I've asked, I've been
> browsing through some old cookbooks to try and find some new ideas for
> cookies. In one of them I just read, "Wash the butter to remove the
> salt."
>
> Say what? When salt is added to butter, it's beaten into the cream when
> the butter is being churned, is it not? Washing wouldn't do any good.
> Am I missing something?
>
, I don't recall ever having seen this particular instruction
> before - and I'm sure it's something I'd remember!

Yes, I had heard this topic before and in fact many old time chef and
bakers recommend that butter should be kneaded in water to remove the
salt before using the butter as laminating fat for flaky pastries.
I did it previously as an experiment but it did not remove much of
the salt out and I am still having difficulty making my pastries made
with washed out butter.
This was due to the reason that salted butter tends to depress the
melting point of that fat making it difficult to sheet and fold the
laminated pastries( as salted butter melt faster than unsalted
butter).
To prove it to yourself , try making croissant and puff pastry dough
with both salted and unsalted butter and compare the difficulty in the
preparation and the quality of the end product.

But if use butter for general purpose baking and cookery in
restaurant and pastry shops. I specify the unsalted variety. However
In large scale institutional food processing cases ,I specify
anhydrous milk fat where I can demand the desired melting point range
and solid fat index requirements to my supplier.
In both cases unsalted butter and selected AMF fractions...
I noted it has better creaming performance than the salted ones as its
tend to melt slower in the mixing bowl therefore more gas bubbles are
incorporated by the sugar during mixing and it yields as well superior
pastry flakiness in my laminated dough and pastes.
But.....for home and small scale baking and cookery...
If I had to make a cake batter or cookie dough using salted butter,
I always consider that normal butter has an average of 2% salt and
take that into account in my formula calculation and reduce the added
salt correspondingly.

BTW,Salt is added in the butter churn.. According to the dairy
processing book by Alan Varnam et al., titled Milk and Milk products:
Technology,Chemistry and Microbiology published by Chapman and Hall,
UK.
'Salt is added as a concentrated suspension 50% NaCl concentration
to attain a butter with a salt content of 2 %. Now if you want a
butter with a salt of 3-4 % you will need a slurry of 70 % salt in
water.The type of salt used in both cases being must have a particle
size of 40-50 microns.'
Therefore salt is intimately dispersed in butter.
Now from this point....
Since salt is introduced as a suspension or slurry, there is a
tendency that with the limited water content of the butter, part of
the salt is in water solution and part is dispersed as extremely fine
crystals of sodium chloride in the fat. But to completely wash all
that salt out will be next to impossible unless you disperse first
the butter as extra fine particles in large amount of water that
approaches the granule size of salt which is impractical.

If you consider the salt solubility of NaCl in water from zero to 100
degrees some data showed that its nearly constant( 35-40% solubility)
regardless of the temperature.
http://www.wpbschoolhouse.btinternet...solubility.htm
Normal butter washing is just kneading the butter in water.It is
likely that you will wash out a portion but not all of them.
Butter will still have remaining water with residual salt (bound in
the fat) in it.
> I'm just curious.....in 30 years of cooking, and owning hundreds of
> cookbooks
Now going back to your cookbook library, sometimes having that
voluminous collection is a liability than an asset in cookery.
I used to have that collection habit but I donated the huge bulk of
those books to the library and retained only a very few which can be
considered very useful referrences.
It had been my experience that having so much cookery books in your
collections brings confusion in my cookery as opposing ideas from
different authors (who are not incidentally good cooks , bakers,
patissiers themselves but just good writers )does not add much to my
learning and skill.
If I need specific information I just have to go the library and
search for that info.
Beside a really good chef, knows his trade by heart and not by
collecting and reading cookery books.
Roy