This is the latest in an ongoing guest series brought to you by Southborough’s Culinary Underground. This week Chef Lori takes on one of my favorite ingredients: butter.
(Photo via Flickr)
Here at Culinary Underground, we’re sauce fanatics. Sauces not only serve to flavor and moisten food, they’re also like paint: they can cover up little imperfections or give color to otherwise to otherwise
We make all kinds of sauces from the simple (such as hot ketchup) to the challenging (sauce Espagnole). Most of our students are interested in learning how to make sauces, so we start them out with the simplest sauce of all: compound butters. These are simply softened butter mixed with a few tablespoons of herbs or other flavoring, formed into logs, and frozen indefinitely.
You may think these are simply flavored butters, but they are technically considered a sauce since they melt so beautifully and flavor so well. You must use butter for these – no margarine, please – and the better the butter, the better the sauce. U.S. butters are generally 80% butterfat; European-style butters are usually 82% or higher, and what a difference! Brands like Kerry Gold and Plugra are worth seeking out, and I stock the freezer with sticks of it whenever I find it on sale.
And for those of you who eschew butter as too fattening, too cholesterol-laden, etc., we say: stop it! Butter is a natural product and a little goes a long, long way.
Compound butters are a snap to make, open to many interpretations, and a busy cook’s best friend. I always have several rolls in the freezer, ready for me to hack off a couple of tablespoons to top a steak, a baked sweet potato, steamed veggies, or to toss with hot pasta. They can be sweet, like a maple-orange butter for pancakes, or savory, as in our recipe here.
And this is one of our favorites for the holidays, when we use it to top filet mignon for our Christmas Eve dinner. This cut of steak is incredibly tender, but lacks flavor; the happy marriage of butter and bacon here solves that problem.
Bacon, Blue Cheese, and Walnut Butter
(1/2 Cup)
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
2 Tablespoons crumbled blue cheese
2 Tablespoons walnuts, toasted and finely chopped
3 slices crisp bacon, crumbled
2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves
¼ teaspoon sea salt (omit if using salted butter)
Freshly ground pepper to taste
Mash the ingredients into the softened butter until well-blended. Use a rubber spatula to form the butter into a roll roughly the size of the original stick of butter. Roll it up in a piece of cling wrap; twist the ends of the roll in opposite directions to form a nice, round roll. Freeze until solid. Do not thaw before using.
