Carefully pour off and spoon the clear ghee into the larger container. When you’re down to the last bit that you can get, strain the rest through the cheesecloth and scrape all the leavings into the container with the skimmed foam. (Save this in the freezer as for the residues from European-style clarified butter. It will taste even better because of the lengthy browning process.) Let the ghee cool to room temperature before covering tightly. It will keep at least six months in the refrigerator, indefinitely in the freezer.
NIT’R KIBEH
(ETHIOPIAN SPICED CLARIFIED BUTTER)
The European-style flavored butters discussed on this page place the flavoring ingredients (lemon juice, chives, parsley, anchovies, or whatnot) in strong perspective against the pure, creamy butter vehicle. In much of northern Africa and the Mideast, people have adopted different approaches. Ethiopian nit’r kibeh (there are various English transliterations from Amharic) exemplifies one of these. You begin by simmering the butter with various spices and flavorings. In the process, you cook out both the perishable and the creamy qualities, while the strong flavors of many different ingredients fuse into a subtle bouquet that registers less immediately on the palate than the warm, nutty fullness of the transformed butter. What remains when the aromatics are strained out is one of the world’s finest cooking fats, as rich-flavored as ghee but with other elusive complexities.
In Ethiopia nit’r kibeh is a favorite sautéing or braising medium for a wide variety of meat, chicken, and vegetable dishes, and serves as a sauce or dressing for k’itfo t’re, the celebrated national counterpart of steak tartare. Among the usual constellation of flavorings, black or “false” cardamom (the pungent Aframomum korarima), ajowan (Trachyspermum ammi; also called bishop’s weed or carom), and fenugreek are available in Indian grocery stores. If you are unable to obtain one or two of the ingredients, simply leave them out; the butter will still have plenty of flavor. If you can find fresh turmeric (also sold in Indian groceries), use a nickel-sized slice, minced, in place of dried ground turmeric.
The recipe can be halved, though I find it easier to make at least a 2-cup batch.
YIELD: About 2 cups
1 pound unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
3 to 4 large shallots, minced
3 large garlic cloves, minced
3 to 4 quarter-sized slices of fresh ginger, minced
Seeds from 3 black cardamom pods (do not substitute green cardamom)
Cinnamon stick (a 1- to 2-inch piece)
1 to 2 whole cloves, bruised
½ teaspoon fenugreek seeds
½ teaspoon ajowan seeds
½ teaspoon dried ground turmeric (or fresh, see above)
Melt the butter over medium-low heat in a small heavy saucepan. When it is hot and fragrant and the sizzling begins to subside, add all the remaining ingredients. Reduce the heat to very low and cook, uncovered, for 45 to 60 minutes, until the shallots and ginger have stopped bubbling and there is a layer of clear golden fat on top. If necessary, push any rising foam to the side so that you can see the butter; do not let the aromatics brown.
Let the nit’r kibeh cool slightly. Place a colander lined with tight-woven cheesecloth or a clean cotton handkerchief over a heatproof bowl; pour the contents of the pan into it, letting the clarified fat drain through. Strain twice if necessary to eliminate any cloudy sediment, which would shorten the keeping time. Discard the residue. Transfer to storage containers and let cool to room temperature before refrigerating; store, tightly covered, in the refrigerator. It will keep for four to six months.
BEURRE MANIÉ
Despite its usual name, beurre manié, or “kneaded butter,” is not an exclusively French invention. It was perfectly at home in nineteenth-century American kitchens, where people often called it “braided butter.” It isn’t a sauce in itself but a variation of the same principle—fat plus flour—that thickens roux-based sauces. In both cases the fat protectively coats the separate flour granules so that they will not coalesce into a sticky mass as soon as they meet some hot liquid ingredient. This allows them to gradually soften (by absorption of water) on exposure to heat and progressively release their starch into the liquid. Result: binding of a sauce.
The main difference is that in a beurre manié the flour starts out with a coating of more or less cool, solid butter, whereas in a roux the fat is already liquefied and heating up fast. Melt butter for a roux and add flour, and the mixture quickly reaches temperatures higher than the boiling point of water. But the flour and butter for a beurre manié are worked together off the heat and added to a simmering liquid, meaning that the temperature never will go above 212°F. The flour-fat mixture undergoes a nuanced melting and melding before the butter becomes fully liquefied. Thus the flour granules can first absorb liquid and then release starch into a sauce in gentle stages. In a roux-based sauce, by contrast, the amalgamation of flour and (already heated) fat happens more abruptly, and by the time the liquid is added more of the butter’s original qualities have been lost. There is the further wrinkle that flour cooked at high temperatures loses more of its thickening power than at low temperatures, so that a certain amount of flour will thicken a certain amount of liquid more in a beurre manié than in a roux.
There is no use trying to reduce a beurre manié to a set of recipe directions, but this is the gist of the process: Put equal amounts of flour and butter (by volume—say, 4 tablespoons each) on a plate or clean work surface. The butter should be very little softened, if at all. The softer and easier to work it is, the likelier the mixture is to be borderline greasy before you add it to any would-be sauce.
With the tines of a fork, patiently mash the flour into the butter until no loose flour is visible and the mixture is perfectly smooth. (I use a fork rather than my fingers in order to keep it as cool as possible.) If it will have to wait a while in a hot kitchen before use, refrigerate it.
To use beurre manié, whittle off bits equal to about ¼ to ½ teaspoonful each and add them to the simmering sauce over low heat. It is hard to give a rule about how much to use, because any liquid to which you add it—say, unthickened gravy from a roast, or a soup that you want to lightly bind—will have a particular viscosity. After a few times you will learn to judge by eye without laborious measuring. Begin by adding the equivalent of about 1 to 2 teaspoons beurre manié per cup of liquid. Stir it in well (or shake and swirl the pan if it’s full of meat or vegetables in large chunks). Watch for signs of thickening and add a bit more if after a minute or two the sauce or soup looks too thin, but remember that it will slightly thicken of its own accord after it reaches serving plates. Once the paste is well incorporated and the sauce thickened to your liking, remove the pan from the heat.
To keep the sauce from acquiring a floury or wheaty taste, either serve it instantly or briefly keep it warm without boiling (for instance, on a heat-deflecting device over very low heat). Or if it fits your schedule, let it simmer at least another 20 minutes. The floury quality develops when a beurre manié–thickened sauce cooks for more than a few minutes, but goes away with longer simmering.
Beurre manié will keep in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for a week or two, but I prefer to make up small amounts as needed.
FLAVORED OR COMPOUND BUTTERS: SOME SUGGESTIONS
As you saw if you put butter in a closed container with onion as suggested on this page, it’s a magnet for penetrating smells and flavors. Merely “cutting the butter with an oniony knife” was the thoroughly English proposal for getting rid of an unwelcome visitor in one of Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons” children’s books. Of course, there are those of us who like raw onion or other assertive, aromatic ingredients just begging to pair up with some of the highly sensitive and reactive chemical components of butter. This affinity is part of the reason that even uncooked butter can be one of the most magical sauces, or sauce bases, in the canon.
Cooked butter can play a similar role when heated with desired ingredients long enough to
become infused with their essence. Anglophiles may think of shellfish butter made by simmering the crushed shells of shrimp or lobster in butter, or potted savories in which gently melted butter is poured over a rillette-like mixture of shredded long-simmered meat. I’m a fan of the quite different approach represented by the Ethiopian spiced butter, nit’r kibeh (this page). But uncooked flavored butters are both easier to produce and much more diverse.
In this large tribe of savory toppings, spreads, and quasi-sauces, the butter is worked with some chosen flavor foil until thoroughly combined. Such mixtures, often called “compound butters,” belong to the fill-in-the-blank category of recipes that really amount to no more than “Take some butter and mix it with some (insert name) to suit your taste.” The partnering ingredients can be in any kind of ground, puréed, mashed, grated, finely minced, or liquid form that permits even distribution.
For practice purposes, try making up a small amount as follows: Put about ¼ cup of butter in a mixing bowl and let it warm to the temperature of a cool room. (It can be salted or unsalted, but the latter is better if you’ll be adding a salty ingredient.) When it’s just soft enough to work with, before it turns greasy and squishy, cream it with a stout wooden spoon and work in about 1 teaspoon of freshly minced chives. Taste it and add more chives if desired. Refrigerate it, covered, until dinnertime. Let it come to room temperature and serve with baked potatoes.
That’s really all there is to it, though you’ll usually deal with larger amounts. One caveat: When you mix perishable raw aromatics into butter, the insulating fat provides nice growth conditions for anaerobic bacteria, so you should plan on using (or freezing) the mixture within twenty-four hours. Dried spices and most things that have been cooked or pickled present no problem.
The following list of flavoring suggestions is far from exhaustive. The sky’s the limit, but simplicity is better than overkill. Note that a little freshly squeezed lemon juice will pep up many butter-herb combinations. Usually I like to keep to fairly Eurocentric ingredients, though I have to say that minced Chinese salted black beans make a great flavored butter. I prefer to work with ½ to 1 cup of butter, depending on the destined use.
Judgment calls on how much or little of a flavoring ingredient to use are difficult. Always start with a small amount and add more to taste. The amounts given here are minimums, meant to be enlarged at your own discretion.
• Minced or grated raw onion (red, yellow, white); finely minced raw or blanched garlic; finely minced scallion (whites, greens, or both). Start with 1 to 2 teaspoons per half cup of butter; use within a day.
• Good meat glaze (beef or veal). With a dash of lemon juice, this is the most luxurious thing you can put on poached fish or asparagus. Start with 1 teaspoon per half cup of butter.
• Balsamic or other preferred vinegar; start with 1 to 2 teaspoons per half cup of butter.
• Any preferred fresh herb or combination of herbs, such as parsley, oregano, chives, cilantro, rosemary (sparingly), basil, shiso, tarragon, minced very fine. Start with 2 teaspoons or less per half cup of butter; use within a day.
• Any preferred dried ground spice or spice mixture, especially “savory” or versatile “sweet-savory” spices such as cumin, paprika or ground red pepper (Hungarian or Turkish), Spanish smoked paprika, black or white pepper, cardamom, allspice, garam masala, curry powder, various homemade dry spice rubs. Start with ½ to 1 teaspoon per half cup of butter.
• Minced or puréed fresh chiles, canned chipotles, roasted sweet red peppers. Start with ½ to 2 teaspoons per half cup of butter, more for sweet peppers.
• Prepared mustard, harissa, sun-dried tomato paste, anchovy paste, hot pepper sauces, miscellaneous herb-based seasoning pastes meant as rubs or marinades for grilled foods. Start with ½ to 1 teaspoon per half cup of butter.
• Minced anchovies or anchovy paste, sardines (sparingly), smoked ham or prosciutto, smoked salmon, salmon “caviar.” Start with ½ teaspoon per half cup of butter for anchovies, 1 to 2 teaspoons for the rest.
• Pesto or fresh Mexican salsa, minced dill pickles or other pickled vegetables, minced capers. Start with 2 teaspoons per half cup of butter.
• Freshly ground pistachios or other nuts. Start with 2 to 3 teaspoons per half cup of butter.
• Finely grated lemon or other citrus rind. Start with ½ teaspoon per half cup of butter.
• Finely grated aged cheese (e.g., Parmesan, aged Gouda). Start with 2 to 3 teaspoons per half cup of butter.
BEURRE BLANC/BEURRE ROUGE
What happens if you half-melt butter while combining it with a small amount of some water-based liquid such as vinegar, white wine, or lemon juice? You get a fragile emulsion, pale and opaque, that makes the best of all sauces for fish (especially pike or shad), poached shellfish, and some vegetables (especially artichokes, asparagus, or leeks). From the miracle of butter chemistry as described earlier, you know that the unique manner in which warmed butter gradually changes from solid to liquid is a heaven-sent gift to cooks, a subtle transition that can be stopped at different points for certain purposes. At about 125° or 130°F the balance of barely solid and fully liquid components creates the richly satiny but ethereal effect synonymous with a proper beurre blanc. Not surprisingly, it can’t be held for more than minutes and does not bear reheating.
The idea is quite old. The sauce for “buttered eggs” (hard-boiled and sliced) in John Murrell’s 1621 A Booke of Cookerie is “sweet butter drawne thicke with faire water.” Something like this was the usual “drawn butter” or “melted butter” of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks, but by then it had become standard practice to hedge the bet by adding a little flour to stabilize the mixture at a higher temperature. (In fact, in some cookbooks “drawn butter” later was degraded into a roux thinned with water.) The flourless French beurre blanc in the style of Anjou became familiar to American cooks only about a generation ago. The splendid food writer Sheila Hibben was already presenting a flourless “white butter” as a New Orleans fish sauce in The National Cook Book in 1932, but I don’t know of any Angevin-type “white butter” in a major all-purpose American kitchen bible before the 1962 Joy of Cooking.
The sauce is not at all tricky. It is both better-flavored and more stable if made with a dash of acid, which usually comes from boiling down a little vinegar, dry white wine, or a combination to a few tablespoons. You then start beating the butter into the hot liquid a little at a time. Adding the fat faster won’t ruin the sauce as with mayonnaise; it just makes the deliberately incomplete melting process slightly harder to supervise. What you want is to keep the butter continually starting to melt without starting to cook. If fully liquefied, it will break the emulsion and turn a velvety sauce into grease, albeit good-tasting grease. (If this happens on your first try, say nothing and serve it anyhow—just remember where things went wrong for next time.) Have the food piping hot when you pour the sauce over it.
The proportions of wine and vinegar can be altered to taste—1 to 1 as given here, or 2 or even 3 parts wine to 1 of vinegar. Some people add a tablespoon of heavy cream to the reduction before starting to add the butter, on the theory that it stabilizes the emulsion, but it isn’t really necessary. Nor do you have to strain the sauce before serving. The bits of shallot accentuate the flavor.
YIELD: 1 cup
½ pound (2 sticks) butter, preferably unsalted and made from cultured cream
1 medium shallot
¼ cup white wine vinegar
¼ cup dry white wine (Muscadet is traditional)
¼ to ½ teaspoon salt (omit if using salted butter)
Cut the butter into tablespoon-sized pieces, and keep it cold.
Mince the shallot very fine. Bring the vinegar and wine to a boil in a small heavy-bottomed saucepan. Add the shallot and simmer over medium heat, not letting the edges scorch, until only 1 to 2 tablespoons of liquid are left. (If the liquid evaporates completely, add 1 to 2 tablespoons water.)
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Remove the pan from the heat, let stand for a minute or two, and beat in 1 to 2 tablespoons of cold butter with a wooden spoon or wire whisk. When it is almost completely melted, return the pan to the stove, either keeping the heat very low or being prepared to snatch it off the burner. Begin vigorously beating or whisking in the rest of the butter, 1 or 2 tablespoons at a time; the sauce will thicken and turn pale as you proceed. Keep watching the consistency; the sauce should never become fully liquefied. If the butter seems to be melting too fast, quickly remove the pan from the heat and set it in a larger saucepan of cold water before proceeding. Add the salt (if using) just before the last few tablespoons of butter. Whisk the sauce for a few seconds off the heat, and serve at once.
VARIATIONS: For Beurre Rouge, replace the white wine with red wine. You can also use lemon juice (for Beurre Citronné).
BEURRE NOIR/BEURRE NOISETTE
(“BLACK BUTTER”/“BROWN BUTTER”)
Probably everyone who has cooked with butter has burned it on at least one occasion. In fact, you can learn a lot about the chemistry of butter by following the process to the smelly and bitter end. But if you break off shortly before the smoke-alarm stage, the result is one of the simplest and best butter sauces. It’s something like the early steps of making either clarified butter or ghee, where you sacrifice the creamy lusciousness of barely melted butter for other effects.
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