Should you use butter or shortening in sugar cookies?

Butter if the cookie is eaten plain, shortening if it has to hold a shape. Butter melts at a lower temperature, so the dough spreads further before it sets, and it is the only one of the two with any flavour. Shortening melts later, so the cookie keeps its height and its edges. In a cookie this plain, the fat is most of the flavour, which is why cut-outs destined for icing are the easiest place to choose shortening.

Can you use half butter and half shortening in sugar cookies?

Yes, and it behaves predictably. Cooks splitting the fat, or pairing butter with butter-flavoured shortening, reported spread landing between the two extremes, which is exactly what the melting-point mechanism predicts. It means this is a dial rather than a side to pick.

Can you use margarine in sugar cookies?

It is the weakest option. Six cooks were explicit that this dough wants butter rather than margarine, and a half-margarine blend read middling. Margarine melts low like butter, so it spreads, without bringing butter's flavour, and it carries water neither of the other fats does.

The decision that shapes the cookie

Butter or shortening in sugar cookies?

Butter for flavour and a wider, flatter cookie. Shortening for height and a shape that holds. You are choosing which one you care about, because you cannot have both.

One mechanism explains all of it: melting point. Butter melts at a lower temperature, so it goes liquid sooner and the dough travels further before it sets. Shortening holds longer, so the cookie stays where you put it. 18 of the 211 recipes we compared use shortening, and they behave exactly as that predicts.

Read against 211 published sugar cookies recipes and 2,400 reports from cooks who changed one thing.

Grammy's Kitchen · illustration

One mechanism, four choices

Which fat to use in sugar cookies

Melting point decides all of it.

For flavour

Use butter if the cookie is eaten plain

Butter is the only one of the two that tastes of anything, and in a cookie this simple there is nowhere for it to hide.

A sugar cookie is flour, sugar, fat and not much else, which is why the design space treats it as the control dish for the whole family. Take the flavour out of the fat and you have removed most of what there was. Accept the wider, flatter cookie that comes with it, and manage the spread with cool butter and a proper chill rather than by switching fats.

For shape

Use shortening if it has to hold an edge

Shortening melts later, so the structure sets before the dough has finished moving, and you get height instead of width.

This is why the thick, pale, frosted supermarket cookie is a shortening cookie, and why cut-outs made with it keep their points. It is a real technical advantage and it costs you the flavour. If the cookie is going under a layer of icing and sprinkles anyway, that is a much easier trade to make.

Worth knowing: a cook who paired shortening with a little vinegar for a deliberately crisp cookie got what they were after, so the fat is not the only thing in play.

The middle

Half and half behaves like half and half

Blends land between the two on spread, in the place the mechanism says they should.

Cooks splitting the fat, or using butter alongside butter-flavoured shortening, reported middling spread rather than anything surprising. That is genuinely useful: it means you can dial this rather than choose a side, and that the result will be predictable when you do.

Not this six cooks

Margarine is not the shortening substitute

Six cooks were clear that butter, not margarine, is what this dough wants, and a half-margarine blend read mid-spread rather than well.

Margarine carries water that neither butter nor shortening brings in the same way, and it melts low like butter without tasting like it. It is the worst square of the grid: the spread of the soft fat and the flavour of the hard one.

Straight with you

Where we would be guessing

So you know how far to trust the rest of this page.

This page is mechanism plus agreement, not a fitted lever

What we measured on this dish is how MUCH fat pushes spread (24 bakes), which is a different question from WHICH fat. The butter-versus-shortening case rests on the melting-point mechanism and on cook reports that line up with it every time. We are not going to borrow the one number to make the other argument sound measured.

Nobody baked the same dough both ways

These are different published recipes and cooks making their own swaps, not one formula tested twice under the same conditions. The agreement is unusually tidy for this site, which is worth saying, and it is still agreement rather than a trial.

Shortening is a minority here

18 of the recipes we compared use shortening at all. That is enough to see the pattern and it is a smaller group than the butter side, so the butter half of this page rests on more evidence than the shortening half.