If You Love Brown Butter, You Need To Try Whipping It
Brown butter, the delicious, flavorful, savory spread seems to be popping up everywhere. From Goodnow Farms Special Reserve Brown Butter chocolate bar to a Camille Rose Brown Butter Melt hair product, it's more than a passing trend. And as soon as food makes the leap to the beauty aisle, it's likely here to stay. In fact, Tastewise notes that brown butter mentions are up over 26% in the last year.
Brown butter isn't a newcomer to kitchens though. It's a classic French technique with a fancy French name, beurre noisette. Its light brown color and nutty flavor led to that name being translated to hazelnut butter. Brown butter is most often used as a pan sauce for savory dishes, like butternut squash ravioli. Recently, it's become a darling of pastry chefs because it adds so much nutty complexity to something like brown butter apple tart.
Maybe the only downfall of brown butter is that you can't spread a dollop of it onto a piece of bread. The simple treat of spreading softened butter onto good bread ranks high on the list of culinary delights. But how can it be an elevated version of butter if it can't perform such a key task? There has to be a way to spread some of this goodness onto bread.
Whipping brown butter into a spreadable state
Chef Studio lays out an innovative technique on YouTube, that transforms the liquid gold that is brown butter into something that can be spread onto whatever you can imagine. Start with placing a medium bowl into a larger bowl full of ice, and set this aside while the butter browns. Be sure to heed Chef Michael Symon's top tip to avoid burning your brown butter and pour it into the bowl over ice right away. Now, start whisking — and don't stop, or the butter will just freeze in the bowl.
As you whisk, the liquid butter will start to thicken and lighten in color. At this point, it appears to be similar to a butterscotch sauce. As you keep whisking, it starts to look like icing but eventually, it will start to cling to the bowl and the whisk. That's the time to stop. Remove the bowl and keep whisking until it returns to that icing stage. Icing that's speckled with delicious, caramelized milk solids. From here, move the butter to a small crock ready to be spread onto some toast with a dusting of flaky salt.
You can skip the ice bath in lieu of putting the bowl of brown butter in the freezer until it's about half solid. And yes, you can also employ an electric hand mixer.
Upgrading whipped brown butter
It seems like this technique could be utilized in all sorts of ways. A comment on the Chef Studio YouTube video suggests a savory version by adding some yuzu and serving it atop whitefish. Another said they use the butter in their coffee.
Really, the possibilities are almost endless when it comes to using this ingredient. You can make a brown compound butter for a grilled steak and add some honey for a new spin on honey butter. A dash of vanilla amplifies brown butter in more dishes than you'd think, so you may want to try it on your next whipped brown butter go-round. Combine both honey and vanilla, following along with this YouTube short from Cafe Hailee which shows you how to make whipped salted honey vanilla butter. Yum.
Use that inspiration to create your own flavored whipped brown butter flavors. And keep in mind these tell-tale signs that the brown butter is done cooking.