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The Impatient Baker's Guide To Bringing Dairy To Room Temp

Ingredients

• BUTTER
• It can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour for refrigerated butter to soften to room temperature. Speed things up by cutting the butter into 1-inch cubes: Take a stick of butter and halve it lengthwise. Flip the butter on its side and halve it lengthwise again. At this point, you should have four long columns of butter. Hold the columns together and slice crosswise into 1-inch pieces. Each piece will be a rough cubePlace the butter cubes in a microwave-safe bowl and microwave at 20% power in 10-second intervals until the butter cubes have softened (it really shouldn’t take more than 20 seconds or so). If you don’t have a microwave, you can place the butter cubes in a double boiler over medium-low heat for around 1 minute. Just be careful to keep an eye on the butter, because once it gets going, it melts fast!
• Perfectly softened butter should still be slightly cool to the touch. The butter cubes should hold their shape when lightly poked. If you want to be technical about it, use a digital thermometer—a thermometer inserted into one of the butter cubes should read between 65° and 70°F, which is generally the range people mean when they say “room temperature” for ingredients.
• EGGS
• To bring whole eggs to room temperature quickly, fill a small or medium bowl with warm water. You want the temperature to feel like a warm bath (you don’t want to end up accidentally cooking the eggs). Carefully place the eggs in the water and let them sit for 5 to 10 minutes. If you do this at the beginning of prepping a recipe, the eggs will be at room temperature right as you finish measuring out the rest of your ingredients.
• If you’re working with a recipe that calls for the eggs to be separated into whites and yolks, it’s easier to separate them while the eggs are still cold—at room temperature, yolks break easily. Once the eggs are separated, place the whites and yolks in separate thick ramekins or other sturdy ceramic vessels. Set the ramekins in a cake pan and pour hot water (not warm water this time—the heat needs to penetrate the ramekins) into the pan until the water reaches halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Let sit for 5 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

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