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I use the Spectrum organic shortening when I can't use lard or butter (icings, mostly).

http://www.spectrumorganics.com/?id=87#j236

It seems to be a bit "stiffer" then Crisco, but I never notice any difference in the end products.

I always go with butter. I have used lard in pie crust before, but I really do prefer the texture of an all-butter crust, and I like that it's reasonably healthier. I stay away from Crisco because of the partially hydrogenated gunk in there. I'm also not a big fan of flaky anyway, so it's not a big sacrifice for me.

I've used the spectrum organic shortening, and it always works well for me. I mainly use it to make baking powder biscuits.

I really never use Crisco (or any shortening) at all, but when my kids ask for cookies, I do buy some. I tried substituting butter, but they came out way too flat, and not how we are used to them. So when I do, I have purchased trans-fat free Crisco in 1-cup sticks, they come in a three-pack. It works just fine!

I'm another butter user.

I'm kind of shocked that people are still using Crisco. I remember my mom ditching hydrogenated oils in the early 80s, so knowledge of their unhealthiness has been around at least that long.

"[Butter] gives baked goods a rich, buttery flavor." Really?

I hate to be the devil's advocate, but Crisco does not actually contain trans fats...
http://www.crisco.com/Products/Details.aspx?groupID=17&prodID=803

I guess I'm in the minority here, but I love using Crisco in pie crusts. I generally feel that because that's essentially the only time I use it, I'm not getting so much transfat that it makes a big difference in my diet.

I just love a flaky pie crust, and it works so well when used in conjunction with butter. But I also really really love butter, and use it most of the time.

I almost always use butter in baking, but last holiday season I used spectrum shortening to make peanut butter blossoms and it worked great. I was glad to have it on hand the other day when well into making whole wheat beer biscuits and realized I didn't have enough butter. My biscuits turned out delicious!!

growing up we always used butter, until i was much older and started doing a lot more cooking for myself did I realize that "shortening" was referring to something other than butter.

im almost curious to try and and see what i have been missing out on (if anything) but probably not worth the health risks. maybe ill try some of this organic spectrum stuff.

I've never found that Crisco makes a flakier crust than Lard, and my butter crusts always come out quite flakey too.

As long as the fat and liquid are very cold, the dough isn't handled too much, and allowed to rest properly, you should get good results. The fat/liquid/flour ratios differ with the different kinds of crust, but the trick is to make sure you don't allow gluten to form while you're making the dough.

kathrynp,
Crisco does contain trans fats. Just read the ingredients. All of those hydrogenated, and partially hydrogenated oils are the trans fats. The label reads 0 because anything under 0.5 grams per serving can be rounded down. The discrepancy only really comes in to play when we use multiple servings, like when making frosting, or baking cookies.

Also -- the recipe above for the flakey pastry dough encourages you to use your fingers if you don’t have a food processor – I’d say don’t do that, instead, use a pastry cutter – they’re about a buck at the grocery store. That way, the heat from your hands doesn’t melt your fat, and you don’t risk overworking your dough.

I guess like anything, if you are not using it every day it's not going to kill you. Crisco really is #1 when it comes to producing flakiness and I have tried frying chicken (which only have maybe 3 times a year) in other oils and there is no comparison to frying it in Crisco because it heats better. I don't fry anything at all these days, so if I am going to have fried chicken, Crisco it is. Sometimes we can just take it a step beyond in the name of healthy.

I bake a lot of pies (and I'm very picky about the crust) - I've been using Spectrum for the last year, with good results! I've found it needs to be allowed to soften slightly in order to cut into the dough properly, and I've had to adjust the flour-to-shortening ratio slightly, but the crust bakes up just as well as one with vegetable shortening.

my favorite recipe for pie dough (thank you Pioneer Woman) contains 1.5 cups of Crisco, or 24 tablespoons. I

f one recipe for pie dough equals 24 servings of crisco (crisco website says serving = 1 tbs) and if each of those tablespoons contains "0 grams trans fats" or no more than 0.5 grams, then at most I am getting 12 grams of trans fat in my pie. Probably less.

If one pie is sliced into 8 pieces (generous, usually 9 or 10), then I would get 1.5 grams of transfat (at most) per serving of pie. an infrequent specialty item. a treat if you will.

If I eat a whole pie and therefore all 12 grams (max) of trans fat, I think I have bigger things to worry about than the transfat in the crisco.

Summation - the crisco stays.

earth balance shortening. vegan and natural and works great.

Frankly, I don't do a lot of baking - so butter is usually the choice for me. However, I use the Spectrum shortening for high-temperature frying since it's incredibly stable (doesn't even *think* of breaking down or getting sticky) - that I actually prefer it to Spectrum's High-Heat Canola Oil for deep frying (like chicken, etc.).

They make a trans-fat free version of Crisco in the green can which is essentially equivalent to the original.

I figure since I eat other bad foods on occasion, I can have a little Crisco. Besides, if I regularly eat foods with recipes that call for Crisco, even with substitutes, its pretty much still bad. Although, I might try the alternatives next time out of curiosity. If they work well for my tastes then I wouldn't mind changing it up.

My favorite pie crust uses butter and shortening. Makes it flaky and buttery. I will have to try Spectrum's this Christmas since I went Veg last July!!

The problem, depending on how much baking you do, is finding something healthy that melts and solidifies at temperatures you want to work with. Crisco is preferable for working with if you are working with things like puff/Danish pastry and don't have the time to work with it, throw it in the fridge, and work with it again like you do with butter because butter melts at a lower temperature and gets too soft. But then Crisco has that waxy aftertaste because of its higher melting point. Lard is fabulous, but, like Crisco, it's not the healthiest.

A master chef I know refers to Crisco as "monkey fat" because he finds it so awful for the bad taste but also because it's so hard to work with and because bakers usually use it solely for the sake of cutting costs. Crisco came into use partly because it's cheap (-er than butter, anyway). He says that, as a baker, he hands down prefers to work with butter, and occasionally lard if he needs a higher melting point. He also swears that the reason that so many folks hate pie dough (eat the filling, leave the crust) is that most folks make it with Crisco. Make it with butter, and people will eat it.

Usually, I use butter (unsalted, of course) all on its on, or mix it with some other shortening, like maybe half, butter half lard. I personally love meat, so I have no idea what vegetarians and vegans do.

I will point out that, technically, everything that's a fat is a shortening. Butter indeed is a shortening (someone above commented that it wasn't) because of what it does - it shortens the gluten proteins so that you don't develop the gluten to the point that you have bread. We call Crisco "shortening" because it's a faster way of saying "vegetable shortening", but Crisco, lard, butter, tallow, etc. are all "shortening".

As for butter as a shortening, unsalted is best for baking rich-dough breads (i.e., bread with fat in it). It has nothing to do with taste but rather everything to do with how that salt reacts with your other ingredients. Salt inhibits yeast fermentation, and the amount of salt in salted butter can be enough that you don't get proper fermentation to make the dough rise. Unless you know how much salt is in the salted butter (it varies greatly from brand to brand) and thus know how much to decrease other salt from your recipe, go for unsalted when baking. Or just expect your bread not to rise nearly as much.

As a side note, in case anyone's wondering: Salted butter came about because it was found that salt preserves butter by slowing how fast it gets rancid, and eventually folks liked the flavor of added salt enough that it became the preferred form of butter for the table, i.e. for putting on rolls and on veggies, etc. That's why we have salted and unsalted varieties.

I'd also like to comment on the misperception that lard is unhealthier than butter. Of course, it all depends on what you mean by healthy, but lard has less saturated fat than butter, and less cholesterol than butter. Lard has more total fat and more total calories, though.

Earth Balance! I love the stuff. And it's vegan...

I've been using something called "Jungle Shortening", made from tropical oils. It works very well, but is a bit soft at room temperature. That and butter work just fine for me, thank you.

Personally, I dislike the flavor of Crisco; more specifically, that nasty film it leaves on the inside of your mouth (the result of the high melting point; your body temperature isn't enough to melt it away). Ick.

And, for the record, lard has less saturated fat than butter. Yes, properly-rendered lard is better for you than butter is.

ABreadADay.com

My family is European, and everything was always made with butter -- lovely, elegant cookies; pastry crusts (for example, delicate, ultra flaky apple strudel); buttercream icings... So Crisco is really an alien product for us. Personally, I have always hated the mouth-feel of Crisco, and dislike anything made with it.

My husband is French-Canadian, and is the one in the family who makes all the pie crusts (including pulled strudel dough), and he sticks to butter. The crusts are delicious and flaky! He comes from a tradition of lard crusts -- meat pies (which only seem right with a lard crust), sugar pies, and apple pies...

I have to comment though about European butter.... European butter is higher in fat than North American butter, and it makes a difference in the quality and taste of products. (The French make butters so good that they make you weep -- I have a raw milk butter from Bretagne that makes you wonder how something as simple as butter can be so special and unique.)

I wish we had the same standard for butter as the Europeans -- i.e., 82% fat -- so good butter would be available in every grocery store.

A final note about trans fats: the problem with them is that they are artificially solidified fats, and the human body just doesn't know how to handle them -- so it effectively doesn't. What that means is that they accumulate in the human body, because the body is not able to rid itself of them. So stored somewhere in your body are all transfats you have ever eaten from every pie crust, donut, muffin, cookie, fried chicken, over the course of your lifetime. Scientists don't yet know what the long-term health implications are (although they already know that they are very worrisome with respect to heart disease and certain cancers) as trans fats only came into widespread use during the early '80s.

Something to consider if you think it is okay to use "just a little, now and then".

People make cookies with shortening??? Gross.

We never had shortening in the house when I was growing up, and I've never used it in my own cooking.

Butter is what gives pie crust it's flavor. Pie crusts made with shortening are hardly worth eating. It's really not hard to make a flaky pie crust with butter, as long as you don't over work it. Use a pastry blender, not a food processor and not your hands. My pie crust always has visible streaks of butter in it when I roll it out, and it ends up so flaky it's almost puff pastry like.

I've use the Spectrum shortening for years just replacing it 1:1 when vegetable shortening is required. I've never had a problem.

I don't use it too often though. I mostly use recipes that call for butter or oil. Primarily I use it for cookies that would not turn out well if all butter was used.

I have been concerned with the health effects of artificially solid fats for 20 years. Crisco is NOT transfat free if it contains hydrogenated oils.
I use butter. Never used shortening. I get flavors from butter that shortening will never have. I haven't had a problem with not flakey enough crusts in pies, but I work my dough very cold.
My mom did the same, and I remember her arguing with my grandmother, and advocate of shortening & margarine.

Oh, thanks to the publicity and I like to think NYC's transfat ban, Nutella is now made from palm oil, not hydrogenated oils!

I have made pretty tasty vegan pie crusts with Earth Balance shortening sticks. it's soy-based, with no transfats, and tastes close-to, but not exactly like butter.
I have also been making a lot of pies recently, and been making Rose Levy Berenbaum's Cream Cheese pie crust (from the Pie and Pastry Bible). It is not as flaky as a lard crust, but, it has excellent flavour -- the kind of pie crust you could just eat on its own!

Please be aware that choosing palm oil is majorly contributing to the extinction of orang utans:

http://www.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_forests/problems/forest_conversion_agriculture/orang_utans_palm_oil/

I have never used shortening in any recipe (because it rarely comes up- most recipes I come across use butter). I did however watch an interesting report lately on coconut oil in Vanuatu and how its helping the residents earn a living. They did say that it tastes like coconut so that probably means that whatever you used it in would taste like coconut. Wouldn't be a problem with sweet dishes (because I love coconut)- but in savoury food??

They also said its being used as an alternative to petrol- imagine all the sweet smelling cars!

I still use Crisco - I try to get the trans-fat free kind when possible. My mother and grandmother swear by Crisco for pie crusts, and my mother has a reputation for making the best pie crusts around. (I am a pale imitation of her.) I bake a pie once a month, TOPS, and obviously don't eat the whole thing myself. It's all about moderation and eating healthy the rest of the time.

The Crisco that has no trans-fats is has the green label. I think they still only sell small tubs of it (as opposed to the huge ones you can get of the regular shortening), but they do also have sticks.

@Peggasus - the cookies are flat when you make them with butter vs shortening because the butter has a lower melting temperature than shortening.

@sally599 - they don't sell the Crisco in the green can any more. It's not even on their website.

As someone else pointed out, the label on the blue cans now legally says "no trans fats" because it's under a certain amount. But the ingredients list all list "partially hydrogenated" oils.

Lard may not be healthy, but it doesn't give you the one-two punch of trans fats, which both RAISE your bad cholesterol and LOWER your good cholesterol. I have better luck with lard in my pie crusts than I ever did with Crisco, but you end up with a slight bacon flavor in it. And I can't make it that way when I'm taking something to work or some other gathering - I can't, in good conscience, offer it to vegetarians or Jewish or Muslim followers. Thanks for the info on Spectrum Organics!

I keep both shortening and lard in my baking cupboard, and (unsalted) butter in the fridge.

The products you'd be using shortening or lard in are not things you'd be eating on a regular basis, and you aren't eating the entire item (a whole pie, for example).

Like others have said, everything in moderation and be sure to incorporate as many healthful items as possible but allowing yourself the occasional treat!

Oh, My grand-grandma loved lard. And so do I.
I hate hidrogenated fat, besides the whole health thing it tastes awful.
I don't know why, but here in Brazil people are so in love with margerine and stuff like that. I hate it all. I love butter!
I'm still a little conserned about using lard in buttercream, but I think it will taste just fine.
I hope one day people will stop buying margerine and will realize that our health is on our own shoulders!
Let's eat good foods, and not industrialized stuff!
It's gone the time where industrialized things used to have lard instead vegetable shortening.
=]

What about ghee/clarified butter? I doesn't have the liquid that regular butter does, so I imagine it'd work well in a pastry. Has anyone tried it?