Brown Butter

What IS brown butter? One of the least expensive and flavor satisfying fats to cook with is brown butter. It adds a rich, concentrated, almost nutty depth to vegetables, eggs, and proteins.

Many chefs tend to lean toward glugs of commercially available oils instead but grandma knew. Brown butter was likely discovered as a byproduct or repeatedly cooking with the same butter, one of the original fats.

What is in Butter?

Butter is made up of about 12 – 15 percent water, 5 percent protein and the rest is fat. The first thing to go when cooking is the water. That is what causes the butter to foam and sizzle when it hits the hot pan. The steam escapes condensing the final product. If you cook the butter slowly you will see it starts to turn a golden brown. The longer you cook it the darker it gets on the way to burned.

In your first adventure with brown butter, stop once the butter starts to turn a golden brown. Spoon, or carefully pour off about half the butter into a bowl. Make sure if you pour off the butter you wipe the outside of the pan with a cloth to make sure none ran down the outside of the pan, it is flammable.

Return the rest to the heat and watch as it darkens to a darker brown. It will get quite fragrant. Do NOT leave the burner and do not let it get close to black. Remove it completely from the heat and pour into another bowl.

Time to taste! I like bread for this adventure. Dip a chunk or piece of bread in the lighter brown butter. Then dip a different piece into the darker butter. Notice the huge differences in taste.

Brown butter offers a complexity and deep flavor that makes it great to drizzle on top of cooked vegetables, seafood, and meats. Pancakes go to a whole new level with brown butter as does simple toast.

Ingredients

8 TBS Butter (salted or unsalted)

How To Do It

Put the butter in a small pan or pot. Place the pan on on your heat source and turn the heat on medium to medium high. Let the butter get to the foaming stage and turn down the heat to medium low. Stir or carefully swirl the butter in the pan to keep it mixed. You will notice the solids starting to darken. Turn off the heat and remove the pan when the butter gets to your desired level of darkness. It is ready for your sauce or other culinary adventure!

Team Thoughts

The smell of the cooking butter wafted through and everyone came wandering in looking to see what that wonderful smell meant.

Megan, our social media butterfly, began our taste testing with some of Sami’s Bakery toast. Their high fiber bread is reminiscent of old world bread that is hardy and holds up well in monumental sandwiches. A half slice of regular buttered toast was quickly cast aside for a tentative dunk in the lighter browned butter. Megan followed with a dunk in the darker butter and then again. After that the buttered toast ended up dunked as well in the darker version. Megan’s notes were that the lighter brown butter had a richer flavor than plain butter but the darkest butter had an incredible richness and an almost sweeter flavor.

One of our other contributors enjoyed the lighter version better as she felt it was a richer more concentrated butter flavoring than the darker version. It was reminiscent of the rich butter flavor for popcorn, without all the nasty chemical additives found in the commercial popcorn topping.

As for me, I am eyeing that darker version and thinking of mixing that with some fresh herbs and that beautiful shrimp I picked up from Publix, or maybe that tofu I grabbed from Lucky’s for one of our next recipes…