Can You Bake with Olive Oil Instead of Butter?

The cake recipe is open, the flour is weighed, and you discover there is barely any butter in the fridge. There is extra virgin olive oil in the cupboard. Can it go into the mixing bowl instead?

Olive oil works well in many cakes. The answer for the recipe in front of you depends on how it uses butter: whisked in after melting, beaten with sugar, or worked cold into flour. Those instructions explain why a swap can be straightforward in one bake and disappointing in another.

Read the method before changing the fat

If the recipe starts by beating softened butter and sugar until pale and fluffy, you are doing more than combining ingredients. This is called creaming. The Institute of Culinary Education explains how the beating creates small air pockets in the butter that affect rise and texture.

Liquid olive oil cannot hold that creamed structure in the same way. For a cake that relies on this step, keep the butter or find a version developed for oil. Pouring in olive oil and carrying on with the remaining instructions will change the structure you started with.

Cold butter has another job. In some scones and pie pastries, pieces of solid fat are worked into flour. Milk Street's baking guidance advises against a straight oil substitution in these doughs. Choose a pastry recipe written for oil if that is what you want to use.

Melted butter offers more room to experiment. Milk Street's kitchen tests found oil a reasonable replacement in baked goods where melted butter is whisked into the other ingredients. Check for substitution advice from the recipe's author before deciding on the quantity.

Why the quantity needs attention too

Butter contains water and milk solids as well as fat. Replacing it with an equal weight of olive oil changes the balance of fat and water in the recipe. Reducing the amount of oil may help with that balance, but it will not recreate the air introduced by creaming.

The finished texture can change considerably. In King Arthur Baking's comparison of fats in chocolate chip cookies, the olive oil batch spread further and baked crunchier than the butter version. That might suit your taste, or it might lose the chewy center you wanted.

For a familiar recipe you hope to reproduce closely, use its tested substitution notes. If none are given, treat a butter-to-oil conversion as an experiment and make a small batch. Trying it on an ordinary afternoon is easier than discovering a different texture in the cake you promised to bring to dinner.

Start with a cake that already uses olive oil

A recipe developed around olive oil gives you a quantity, mixing method and balance of liquids to follow. You can concentrate on whether you like the result.

Stephanie Cho's Everyday Olive Oil Cake uses extra virgin olive oil with eggs, milk, orange zest and juice. The eggs and oil are whisked together first, followed by the remaining wet ingredients and then the dry ingredients. Follow that sequence, along with the stated pan size and oven setting, for your first attempt.

For a chocolate option, Molly Marzalek-Kelly's Chocolate Olive Oil Cake combines extra virgin olive oil with cocoa in a batter made from separate wet and dry mixtures. Both recipes give you a complete starting point without having to redesign a butter cake.

Once you have baked a recipe as written, you have something useful to compare with the next attempt. Changing the fat, flour, sugar and pan all at once makes it hard to work out which change produced the result.

Choose an oil you want to taste in dessert

Think about flavor as you would when choosing an olive oil for dinner. For your first orange or lemon cake, a fresh, gently fruity oil is an approachable choice. Cho's recipe specifically recommends fruitiness without assertive bitterness or grassiness.

Taste a little oil before measuring it. If it is very peppery and you want a delicate vanilla cake, choose a milder oil or a recipe that welcomes a stronger flavor. Milk Street found extra virgin olive oil worked well with citrus, chocolate and spices in its tests.

You can begin with a suitable oil you already use in the kitchen. Bake one batch before buying a bottle especially for dessert, and let the cake cool before judging its flavor. Try a slice without a thick topping so you can taste the cake itself.

Keep a note of which oil you used beside the recipe. If you want a gentler flavor next time, change the oil while keeping the recipe steady. It is much easier to repeat a cake you enjoyed when that detail is written down.

Photo: “lemon olive oil cake” by stu_spivack, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Original photograph; displayed with a crop.