Due to a dairy allergy in the family, I'm always stuck cooking with margarine. For years I've been making a chocolate chip cookie recipe from Cooks Illustrated that involved browning the butter before adding it to the cookies. I've tried so many ways to recreate browned butter with margarine.
This afternoon I finally came up with what was, for me, an acceptable recreation. Since I have four young kids, I'm not going to be able to try it 10 different ways to perfect it. If Grant or anybody wants to play with this and perfect it, go for it!
1. Melt margarine (Fleischman's unsalted) in pan.
2. Add about .5 tsp of nondiastatic malt powder (to replace missing proteins and reducing sugars found in dairy butter) per stick of margarine.
3. Took about 20 minutes to cook the water out of the margarine. The resulting clarified fat was golden brown.
4. Weighed final product. For 8 oz starting weight, I figured it should have been about 6.8 oz fat (assuming 85% fat content). It was 5 oz. Go figure. Added coconut oil to bring it up to 6.8 oz (the closest textural match to butterfat I could think of).
5. Added a couple drops of LeBlanc hazelnut oil to bring the taste even more in line with browned butter.
Hopefully this helps someone else involved with cooking for allergic loved ones!
--Jeff
