If you’ve recently found yourself in the dairy aisle of the grocery store unable to locate a delicious something called “brown butter”, you are not alone. There are lots of people out there, even smart food professionals like my friend Nick, that don’t know exactly what that lovely, nutty liquid is.
But don’t worry. Just this week, it seems, there are suddenly a ton of food bloggers out there just chomping at the bit to talk about brown butter and what exactly one should do with it.
B+H=BB*
(Butter plus heat equals brown butter.)
Brown butter is, essentially, butter that’s cooked just before it burns. Put it in pastries and they suddenly taste a lot better. Drizzle it over Italian spaghetti with fried sage and you have one of the simplest, most elegant pasta courses ever. Pour it on fresh from the garden vegetables and potatoes and watch people’s eyes roll back.
And now, thanks to Michael Ruhlman, author of the amazing book The Elements of Cooking, and a number of other bloggers weighing in on the subject, there’s plenty of information to be had about the glories of brown butter.
Check out the following great blogs:
Brown Butter can be broken down to its elemental parts to make some really cool stuff.
Use it to make an amazing cake by Suzanne Goin that’s so good you’ll swoon over it.