Converting butter to oil

Butter or olive oil? 

That’s a good question, calorie wise butter seems to do a little better;

Butter = 100 cals per tablespoon (tbsp.):  Olive Oil = 120-130 cals per tbsp.  But fat wise, well you don’t need me to tell you how much worse butter to olive oil. 

I doubt there is an advert in Italy showing a group of elderly British men and women dancing to techno with the caption “butter keeping hearts and joints strong”.  Amusing as that would be it would never happen.

Personally I have a weakness for butter, as a child I would cut of bit of butter and eat it like cheese.  I still have to resist the temptation to put a huge hunk of butter on my hot cross buns or scones.  I just love that buttery tasty ….  

However, there are times when swapping oil for butter is a good idea, in normal cooking and baking.   Although I will maintain that you cannot do with a chicken kiev, can you imagine trying to get the galicy oil to stay inside the chicken?  No thanks butter will do me!

I do a lot of baking and often bring those cakes into work, but one colleague is lactose intolerant and to make sure she doesn’t suffer any adverse effects, I use a mild olive oil instead of butter.   

I have to stress the use of MILD olive oil,  virgin and extra virgin are too strong in taste (often quiet peppery) and expensive.  I am sure there are cakes out there that would do well with either virgin or extra virgin, but for your average sponge mild will do nicely.

Oil in all but chocolate cakes works really well and can make the cake lighter and last longer.  It also reduces the time of making the cake, creaming the butter and sugar takes time either by hand or electric whisk, but oil already being liquid just needs a couple of minutes to become light and airy.

One thing you can’t do when using oil instead of butter is do a straight like for like swap.  Butter is weighed in grams (gms) or ounces (oz) (in the UK) and liquid is measured in millilitres (ml, be that cups, or spoons).  There are recipes which call for fluid ounces (fl oz) but it would be unwise to just assume that 4 oz of butter and 4 fl oz of olive oil would have the same effect.  Besides fl ozs are not that common and a lot of us probably think more in mls or tbsp.

So how do I do this? – I hear you ask (well I assume you are asking if you are reading this and don’t already know the answer!).  The best way to assure a moist but not saturated cake is to go from grms/oz to tbsp. then you can (if you so wish) turn that in to mls.

Seems complicated, it is kinda so I have put together a table of the different weights and their conversion to mls. I will tell you how I did it if you would like to work it out for yourself too. 

I am also doing this as the only conversion tables I find are American, and they use cups of butter to convert….. I don’t do cups,  I have a set of measuring cups at home but don’t really use them.

Gms (rounded to the nearest whole number to) mls

Grams	Tablespoons	Millilitres
113	8	120
170	12	180
227	16	240
284	20	300
340	24	360
397	28	420

Ozs to mls

Ounces	Tablespoons	Millilitres
4	8	120
6	12	180
8	16	240
10	20	300
12	24	360
14	28	420

This site has just about anything you wish to convert www.onlineconversion.com

So how did I come to these amounts?

1 tablespoon = 15mls (UK measurements)

1 ounce = 2 tablespoons = 30 mls

1 gram = 0.07 tablespoons = >1 ml (a little more fiddly).

Therefore if a recipe for a sponge cake is:

4oz flour

4oz sugar

4oz butter

2 eggs

Pinch salt

Would read:

4oz flour

4oz sugar

8 tablespoons/120mls mild olive oil

2 eggs

Pinch of salt

I do hope you have found this entry useful and that you will have more confidence to use oil and butter as you so choose to.

Oh and finally…

Why I didn’t include chocolate earlier?  Chocolate is already unhealthy so it seems a little pointless to take out the butter.  Besides butter does make for a richer cake and a chocolate cake has to be rich!  (Says me anyway).

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