Compound butter: The culinary school-approved way to radically transform your meals Butter on its own is pretty fantastic. For me, the first few salted honey butter parker house rolls of September always signal a season of transition.
Summer is fading and autumn is waiting in the wings. As a result, my own cooking shifts during this season, too. When time is limited, I cook from my pantry more often, focusing on simple ingredients that pack big flavor with minimal effort. Compound butter, as the name suggests, is simply butter cohesively combined with another ingredient.
You’ve likely had it before, whether its lemon-infused butter served over fish or cinnamon-honey butter served with fluffy Parker House rolls. Oftentimes, they’re used as a finishing butter, especially when they have some fresh herbs in it,” Joshua Resnick, a chef-instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education, told Salon. Resnick also said that compound butters are a fantastic way to preserve fresh flavors — like from minced herbs or lemon zest — for just a little longer. By storing them in butter, it allows for those ingredients to maintain their flavor for a longer period of time because you are preserving them in fat. By storing them in butter, it allows for those ingredients to maintain their flavor for a longer period of time because you are preserving them in fat,” he said.
Think about a duck confit, for a minute. The flavors stay preserved because of the duck fat. Compound butter acts in the same manner, elongating the life of your product. And while many compound butters lean into acidic or herbaceous flavors, both Resnick and Edward Kim, the chef at Chicago’s Asian-inspired Mott Street and Second Generation restaurants, encourage home chefs to experiment with savory compound butters, specifically miso butter.
The combination of miso — a fermented soybean paste that’s especially popular in traditional Japanese cooking — and butter imbues a dish with a one-two punch of fatty, umami flavors. Its addition to even simple items can radically transform them. It’s so simple, but it is one of our most popular dishes,” Kim said. One comment we got recently about it was that, ‘It tastes so much like Thanksgiving,’ probably because of the mix of thyme and the savoriness of the mushrooms and miso. Thanks to its fermented nature, miso also has a little bit of funk that can mimic aged cheese, especially when combined with higher-fat butters. For that reason, it’s really fun to use as an analogue for cheese sauce.