11 Substitutes for Shortening (for Pie Crust, Cookies, and Frosting)

The recipe says shortening, the pantry says otherwise. Maybe you never bought a can in the first place, maybe you are trying to avoid it, or maybe you are halfway into a pie dough with cold hands and an oven already preheating.

Good news: shortening is one of the easier ingredients to replace, because what it does is unusually simple to describe. It is 100% fat, it is solid at room temperature, it melts at a notably high 117°F, and it tastes like nothing at all. Every recipe that calls for it is leaning on one or more of those four facts.

Which means the right swap depends entirely on which of those jobs your recipe cares about. A flaky pie crust needs the solid fat. A cut-out cookie needs the high melting point. A pure white buttercream needs the neutral flavor. Below, the substitutes are grouped by job, with exact ratios and honest notes on where each one shines and where it falls apart.

The Quick List

• Butter — the best-tasting swap, and the one that changes the texture most
• Lard — the flakiest pie crust of the bunch and the closest structural match
• Refined coconut oil — the best 1:1 vegetarian swap for crusts, biscuits, and cookies
• Ghee or clarified butter — butter flavor with none of butter's water
• Beef tallow — sturdy savory crusts, and the best swap for deep frying
• Non-hydrogenated palm shortening — a like-for-like replacement that needs no adjustment
• Stick margarine or vegan butter sticks — the easiest dairy-free swap (sticks only, never tubs)
• Neutral or olive oil — only when the shortening gets melted, or for greasing the pan
• Unsweetened applesauce — cuts fat in muffins and quick breads
• Greek yogurt — lightens cakes and snack breads while adding a little protein
• Bacon fat or schmaltz — savory biscuits, cornbread, and pot pie crusts

What Shortening Is Actually Doing (This Decides Your Swap)

Shortening is pure fat with no water in it. Butter, by contrast, is only about 80% fat, with up to 16% water and roughly 2% milk solids making up the rest. That difference sounds academic until you bake with it. A cup of butter carries somewhere around two to two and a half tablespoons of hidden water, and in the oven that water turns to steam. In a pie crust, that steam is a gift: it puffs the dough into separated flaky layers. In a cookie, it is a problem: it thins the dough and the cookie spreads wider and flatter.

The second difference is melting point. Shortening melts at about 117°F, butter at about 95°F. Because shortening holds its shape longer in the oven, the flour and eggs around it have time to set before the fat gives way, which is why shortening cookies stand tall, shortening crusts keep their crimped edges, and shortening buttercream survives a warm room. The third job is structural: a solid fat coats flour and prevents gluten strands from cross-linking, which is where the name comes from and why the crumb turns tender and short instead of chewy. The fourth is flavor, or rather the deliberate absence of it.

So before you pick a substitute, ask which of those four the recipe leans on. A muffin batter mostly wants fat and tenderness, so nearly anything works. A lattice-topped pie or a piped buttercream in July wants the melting point, and your options narrow fast.

For Pie Crust, Biscuits, and Flaky Pastry

This is shortening's home turf. The recipe has you cutting cold solid fat into flour, leaving pea-sized pieces that melt in the oven and leave gaps behind. Any substitute here has to be solid and cold when it goes in — a liquid oil coats the flour evenly and gives you a crumbly, sandy crust instead of a layered one.

Lard

• Swap: 1 cup shortening → 1 cup lard (a straight 1:1 by volume or weight)
• Best for: The flakiest, crispest pie crusts, savory pies, biscuits, tamales, and flour tortillas
• Skip it for: Vegetarian baking, and delicate dessert crusts if all you can find is standard grocery-store lard
• Health notes: About 39 g saturated fat per 100 g, versus roughly 51 g for butter, with close to half its fat monounsaturated

Lard is the swap most home bakers underrate. Like shortening it is essentially 100% fat, so it behaves the same way in the bowl, but its fat crystals are larger and less uniform, which is exactly what produces flaky sheets rather than a uniform crumb. Side-by-side comparisons generally give lard a crisp crust and more flavor than shortening, and it is sturdy enough that the crust still holds up days later.

Ask for leaf lard if you can get it — the fat from around the kidneys, neutral enough for a fruit pie, where cheaper rendered lard carries a faint pork note that suits a chicken pot pie better than an apple galette. And because lard is softer than shortening at room temperature, keep it in the fridge until the moment you cut it in and stop mixing while the pieces are still visible. Overworked lard dough goes greasy rather than flaky.

Butter

• Swap: 1 cup shortening → 1 cup cold butter, and hold back about 2 tablespoons of the ice water in the recipe
• Best for: Flavor, and genuinely flaky layers
• Skip it for: Elaborate crimped edges, lattice tops, and rolling dough in a warm kitchen
• Health notes: Butter has roughly double the saturated fat of shortening per tablespoon (about 7 g versus about 3 g)

Crisco's own guidance is that shortening and butter swap in equal amounts, and for most home baking that is all you need to know. The nuance is the water. Since butter is about a fifth water and milk solids, a cup of it delivers around 20% less actual fat than a cup of shortening, and it adds a couple of tablespoons of liquid you did not plan for. In pie dough, the fix is simple: hold back roughly 2 tablespoons of the ice water per cup of butter and add it back only if the dough will not come together. If you want the fat to match exactly, use 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of butter.

What you get in return is flavor no other fat matches, plus that steam-driven flakiness. What you give up is stability: butter starts softening around 95°F, so an all-butter crust slumps more in the oven and holds a decorative edge less crisply. Work fast, keep the butter in cold cubes, and chill the shaped crust for 20 to 30 minutes before it bakes. If you love butter's flavor but need the structure, use half butter and half of one of the solid fats below — that blend is why so many classic pie recipes call for both. (Our guide to butter substitutes covers the reverse problem.)

Refined Coconut Oil

• Swap: 1:1, with the oil at around 70°F so it has a scoopable, shortening-like texture
• Best for: Vegan and dairy-free crusts, biscuits, and cookies
• Skip it for: Hot kitchens, and any recipe where you would rather not risk the coconut flavor of the virgin kind
• Health notes: The highest saturated fat of anything here, around 82 g per 100 g. This is a texture swap, not a health upgrade

Coconut oil is the only common plant fat that is genuinely solid at room temperature, which makes it the closest vegan match for shortening. America's Test Kitchen swapped refined coconut oil straight into pie dough and biscuit recipes and found it worked, with the coconut oil performing as well as or better than the shortening in biscuits. Use refined, not virgin, unless you want the coconut flavor to show up in the finished crust.

Temperature is the whole game here. Coconut oil melts around 76°F, far lower than shortening's 117°F, so it goes from firm to liquid faster than you expect on a warm counter. Bakers who use it in crusts recommend having it at around 70°F, since it turns rock hard straight out of the fridge and starts to separate if it gets too warm. The resulting crust is very tender and browns beautifully; it is just less forgiving to roll than a butter or lard dough.

Ghee or Clarified Butter

• Swap: 1:1, chilled until firm enough to cut into the flour
• Best for: Buttery flavor with none of butter's added water — crusts, biscuits, and pastry
• Skip it for: Dairy-free baking, and wetter doughs if you do not want any puffing

Ghee is butter with the water and milk solids cooked off and strained away, leaving nearly pure butterfat. That makes it a rare thing: butter flavor with shortening's water content. When America's Test Kitchen replaced the shortening in two pie doughs with ghee, the crusts had a rich, buttery flavor the shortening crusts lacked while staying just as tender and flaky.

Two caveats came out of that same test: the ghee crusts were slightly greasier, and the wetter of the two doughs puffed up almost like a puff pastry. Neither is a dealbreaker, but expect a crust with more personality than the flat, neutral one shortening gives you. Ghee is soft at room temperature, so refrigerate it until firm before cutting it in.

Beef Tallow

• Swap: 1:1
• Best for: Savory pies, pot pie lids, hand pies, biscuits, and anything fried
• Skip it for: Sweet dessert crusts, and vegetarian cooking
• Health notes: Roughly 40% saturated fat, in the same neighborhood as lard

Tallow is rendered beef fat, firmer at room temperature than lard and closer to shortening's texture straight out of the tub. It makes a sturdy, crisp crust and holds structure well, which is why it was a standard fat in savory baking long before canned shortening existed. The trade-off is flavor: tallow is fairly neutral raw but develops a distinctly beefy, roasted note once baked. Wonderful under a beef pot pie, wrong under a peach one.

Non-Hydrogenated Palm Shortening

• Swap: 1:1, with no other adjustments at all
• Best for: Every single thing shortening does — this is shortening, just from a different oil
• Skip it for: Nothing functionally; the only reason to skip it is sourcing

If you want the exact performance of shortening without the classic blue can, non-hydrogenated palm shortening (sold by brands like Spectrum and Nutiva) is a true like-for-like replacement: solid at room temperature, neutral in flavor, 100% fat, no ratio math or technique changes. It is the swap to reach for when a recipe is unusually fussy — laminated doughs, decorated cut-out cookies, a pie crust you are being judged on — and you do not want new variables. The honest caveat is environmental rather than culinary: palm oil production drives deforestation in some regions, so look for RSPO-certified or otherwise sustainably sourced options if that matters to you.

For Cookies

Cookies are where shortening's melting point does the most visible work, and where a careless swap shows up most obviously. If your recipe calls for shortening, it very likely wants a cookie that stays thick, keeps a sharp shape, or does not run into its neighbors on the sheet.

Butter (with One Adjustment)

• Swap: 1:1, then chill the shaped dough for 30 to 60 minutes before baking
• Best for: Flavor, browning, and chewy centers with crisp edges
• Skip it for: Cut-out cookies that must hold a sharp edge, and thick bakery-style cookies

This is the swap most people make, and it works — as long as you expect a different cookie. Butter's water content and lower melting point mean the dough spreads thinner during baking, so the same recipe gives you a wider, flatter, crisper cookie with more browning and much better flavor. For a chocolate chip cookie, most people call that an upgrade. For a snickerdoodle you wanted puffy, or a gingerbread man whose arms you would like to keep, it is a downgrade.

The fix is temperature, not ratio: chill the portioned dough thoroughly so the butter starts colder and takes longer to melt, and space the cookies farther apart on the sheet. If shape really matters, use half butter and half coconut oil or palm shortening — a standard approach, precisely because neither fat does both jobs well on its own.

Refined Coconut Oil

• Swap: 1:1, softened to a scoopable solid rather than melted
• Best for: Dairy-free cookies that need to hold their shape
• Skip it for: Recipes where you want deep browning and butter flavor

Solid and water-free, coconut oil gives you shortening's spread control without dairy. Cream it with the sugar the way you would shortening — softened, not liquid, or the dough turns greasy and the cookies spread anyway. Refined is flavor-neutral; virgin adds a light coconut note that suits an oatmeal or chocolate cookie and clashes with a delicate sugar cookie.

Stick Margarine or Vegan Butter Sticks

• Swap: 1:1, using sticks only — check that the label says at least 80% fat
• Best for: Dairy-free cookies, cakes, and frostings with minimal fuss
• Skip it for: Anything, if all you have is a tub spread (see the last section)

Crisco lists margarine alongside butter as an equal-amount substitute, and modern vegan butter sticks are formulated to roughly the same 80% fat standard, so they behave much like butter: a little more spread, a little more moisture, no dairy. Treat them exactly as you would butter, chilling step included, and watch the salt — many are salted, so taste before adding the full amount the recipe calls for.

For Frosting and Buttercream

Shortening plays a very specific role in American buttercream: it stays solid at room temperature, it is pure white, and it tastes of nothing, so the frosting holds a piped rosette in a warm room and takes color cleanly. If you swap it out, those are the three things you are trading.

All Butter

• Swap: 1:1 — if the recipe calls for 1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup shortening, use a full cup of butter
• Best for: Flavor, and any cake going from the fridge to the table
• Skip it for: Outdoor events, warm kitchens, elaborate piping, and pure white frosting

An all-butter buttercream tastes far better than an all-shortening one, and there is no ratio trickery involved: swap it straight across. What changes is behavior. Cake decorators are blunt about this — all-butter frosting will melt, sag, or wilt faster in a warm room or outdoors, and it loses a piped shape sooner. Wilton makes the same point from the other direction: frosting made with shortening holds up better to time and temperature, and all-shortening recipes are what produce genuinely snow-white frosting, since butter tints everything a soft ivory.

If you need both flavor and stability, the standard compromise is to replace only half the shortening with butter, keep the frosting cool, and chill the finished cake before transporting it. For a dairy-free version, vegan butter sticks work at 1:1, though they are softer still — plan on refrigerating between steps.

For Cakes, Muffins, and Quick Breads

This is the most forgiving category. Batters like these lean on fat for moisture and tenderness far more than for structure, so almost anything works and the healthier swaps genuinely earn their place.

Butter or Neutral Oil

• Swap: Butter 1:1. Oil 1:1 only if the recipe melts the shortening or beats it into a liquid batter
• Best for: Everyday cakes, muffins, quick breads, and brownies
• Skip it for: Oil in any recipe that creams solid shortening with sugar for lift

If the method says to melt the shortening, a liquid fat is a straight swap and you can pour in neutral oil or a light olive oil cup for cup. If the method says to cream the shortening with sugar, though, the recipe is counting on the fat trapping air, and a liquid oil cannot do that — you will get a denser, flatter cake. In that case use butter (or a stick margarine) and cream it just as long as the recipe asks. Cakes made with butter instead of shortening tend to have a slightly softer crumb and much better flavor.

Unsweetened Applesauce

• Swap: Replace up to half the fat with an equal amount of applesauce — 1 cup shortening → 1/2 cup fat + 1/2 cup applesauce
• Best for: Muffins, quick breads, snack cakes, and soft drop cookies
• Skip it for: Replacing all the fat, and for pie crust, frosting, or anything meant to be crisp
• Health notes: Cuts a large share of the fat and calories and adds a little fiber and natural sweetness

Applesauce swaps fat for moisture, which is why it lightens a banana bread beautifully and ruins a shortbread. Extension-service guidance is consistent on the ratio: substitute half the fat, not all of it. Go further and the crumb turns gummy and rubbery, because there is not enough fat left to tenderize it. Applesauce brings its own sweetness, so you can usually dial the sugar back a little, and start checking for doneness early.

Greek Yogurt

• Swap: 1 cup shortening → 1/2 cup butter or oil + 1/4 cup Greek yogurt
• Best for: Muffins, snack cakes, and quick breads you want to lighten without drying out
• Skip it for: Flaky, crisp, or piped applications
• Health notes: Cuts fat and calories while adding protein and a little calcium

Greek yogurt is the move when you want to trim fat but keep a moist, tender crumb, and unlike applesauce it adds protein rather than sugar. Do not swap it in for all the fat; the standard ratio keeps half the fat and adds a smaller amount of yogurt to make up the volume. Use plain yogurt, full-fat or low-fat, and hold back slightly on the other liquids since it brings its own. (If you are choosing a tub, here is how to pick a Greek yogurt.)

For Greasing Pans and Deep Frying

Plenty of recipes call for shortening not as an ingredient but as equipment: greasing a cake pan, or filling a pot for doughnuts. These are the easiest swaps of all.

For greasing, anything goes: shortening is popular because it clings to vertical pan walls and does not burn, but softened butter, a neutral oil, or a baking spray all work, and no ratio applies. For a fussy bundt pan, brush on butter or oil and dust with flour, tapping out the excess; for a plain cake pan, a thin coat of oil plus a parchment round beats any single fat. Frying is where the choice matters.

Lard, Tallow, or a High-Smoke-Point Oil

• Swap: 1:1 by volume — just fill the pot to the same depth
• Best for: Doughnuts, fried chicken, and anything else that needs sustained high heat
• Skip it for: Nothing, though butter and extra virgin olive oil are poor choices at frying temperatures

Household shortening has a smoke point around 329°F, with lard closer to 374°F, so lard and tallow are both straight upgrades in heat tolerance as well as flavor. Refined peanut, canola, sunflower, or avocado oil all sit comfortably above the 350 to 375°F range most frying calls for. What you should not use is butter, which scorches around 302°F, or extra virgin olive oil, whose flavor and price are both wasted in a fryer.

Bacon Fat or Schmaltz

• Swap: 1:1 in savory baking, or replace half the shortening if the flavor is strong
• Best for: Biscuits, cornbread, savory pie crusts, and frying eggs or potatoes
• Skip it for: Anything sweet, and anything vegetarian

If you already keep a jar of bacon drippings or rendered chicken fat in the fridge, you are holding a free solid fat that behaves much like lard. Strain it well, chill it firm, and cut it into biscuit dough exactly as you would shortening. Half bacon fat and half butter is a particularly good combination for a savory biscuit — enough smoky flavor to notice, enough butter that it does not taste like breakfast leftovers. (Our bacon substitutes guide has more on cooking with and around it.)

The Healthier Angle, Honestly

Shortening's bad reputation is mostly out of date. The problem used to be partially hydrogenated oil, the main dietary source of artificial trans fat. The FDA determined in 2015 that partially hydrogenated oils are no longer generally recognized as safe, with most uses required to stop by June 2018, and Crisco reformulated to use fully hydrogenated oils instead. Today's shortening is not the product the reputation was built on.

Which leads to a mildly awkward fact: on saturated fat, shortening beats butter. Crisco advertises 50% less saturated fat than butter, and the numbers back that up — roughly 25 g per 100 g for vegetable shortening against about 51 g for butter. Coconut oil, the swap most often assumed to be the healthy one, is the highest of the lot at around 82 g. So "swap the shortening for butter or coconut oil" is a flavor and texture decision, not a health one.

The swaps that genuinely improve a recipe's nutrition either change the type of fat or reduce the total. Where a liquid fat works — muffins, quick breads, snack cakes, anything the recipe melts the shortening for — olive oil or avocado oil trades saturated fat for mostly monounsaturated fat, and extra virgin olive oil brings polyphenols with it (here is how to buy the real thing, and our look at whether seed oils deserve the panic). Where the recipe can spare it, replacing half the fat with applesauce or Greek yogurt does more for a muffin than any fat-for-fat swap will.

None of which means shortening is something to fear in a pie crust you make twice a year. The fat in your Thanksgiving pastry is not what moves the needle; what you eat on the other 363 days is.

What Not to Use

• Tub spreads and light spreads. Anything labeled a "vegetable oil spread" rather than margarine can fall well under the 80% fat mark, with the balance being water. That extra water means excess spread, rubbery textures, and cakes that never set properly. Sticks only.
• Whipped butter. It is aerated, so a cup holds far less fat than a cup of stick butter, and whipped butter cannot be substituted by volume into a recipe written for sticks. If it is all you have, weigh it instead.
• Any liquid oil in a cut-in dough. Oil coats flour evenly instead of staying in discrete pieces, so a pie crust or biscuit made with oil comes out sandy rather than layered. A fine crust in its own right, just not the one you were making — and the same goes for melted butter or melted coconut oil wherever the recipe says to cut it in or cream it.
• Coconut oil in a warm kitchen, unchilled. It goes liquid around 76°F, so on an August afternoon it can melt into the flour before you have finished mixing. Chill it for 10 minutes first.
• Diet or reduced-fat anything. Reduced-fat butter, low-fat cream cheese, and light margarine all replace fat with water, the one ingredient these recipes are specifically avoiding.

Picking the Right One for Your Recipe

If you take one thing from all of this: match the substitute to the job, not to the ingredient. Solid and cold for crusts and biscuits. A high melting point for cookies that hold their shape and frosting that survives a warm room. Almost anything for muffins and quick breads, which is also where the healthier swaps actually pay off.

A guide like this can only take you so far, though, because it does not know what you are making. That is where Eat Well Planner helps: import or add the recipe you are working from, and the AI recipe chat can read that exact ingredient list and tell you which substitute fits, whether the ratio needs adjusting for the other liquids in the bowl, and what will change about the result. If you are adapting a whole recipe rather than one line, recipe variations will rewrite it end to end — dairy-free or vegan, swaps already worked in.

And if you are here because you would rather not bake with shortening at all, the Make It Healthier feature proposes swaps like these on your own recipes and verifies the nutritional gain before suggesting anything, while the Recipe Playground lets you try a swap and watch the nutrition score move in real time. That settles "is butter really better than shortening here?" far more usefully than an argument in the comments.