I Love Compound Butter
There is nothing that spices up my cooking more than using a compound butter to enhance the flavours of what I'm preparing.
I don't really have a lot to explain or say - it's not like I'm a chef or anything - I just know that there's a handful of little tricks and ways to cook I've picked up on over the years that I really like to use. If anyone reading this tries it and enjoys it too, then all the better!
I'm also certainly not the one who "came up" with any of this either, let's get that straight right now; like most, I learned about compound butters elsewhere, so I'm just passing along the know-how!
What I always like to mix is a garlic compound butter. I pair this with meats I want to season or tenderize, like chicken, steaks and pork chops! While these aren't exact measurements, what I typically try is a simple ratio of 1:4:3:3:4 of the following three ingredients:
- Butter
- Minced garlic
- Thyme
- Rosemary
- Beef tallow
The butter is pretty self-explanatory, I certainly hope I don't have to sit here and explain by compound butter contains... butter.
Minced garlic is a concentrate of chopped-up garlic cloves, and I find it's always much more strong-tasting than even fresh garlic! I was always told by my mother to be very careful and modest when using garlic, and then I learned that she hates garlic, so I don't listen to her about garlic anymore! Still, the flavour is quite strong with minced garlic and I use it due to being the most cost-effective, so for every teaspoon of butter, I use 1/4 teaspoon of garlic.
The herbs I choose for putting in the compound butter are thyme and rosemary. I really like the earthy and peppery taste that thyme has! I think it pairs so well with the already rich and savoury flavours that garlic and butter lend. And the rosemary I find is exactly the fresh, stereotypical herb-like flavour I need to balance out a lot of these more umami notes of the butter.
Lastly, I like to use beef tallow a lot! I certainly don't like that tallow is being co-opted by a bunch of women who want to slather it all over their face and driving the prices of food-grade through the roof, but that's another rant for another day...
Beef tallow, to me, gives that same fatty richness that butter can. It makes sense since they're both an oil you can lubricate a cooking surface with - but I find both butter and beef tallow can be quite expensive. The reality though is that butter has more applications than tallow does. For this reason, I buy both and use the tallow in combination with the butter to reduce the amount of butter I actually have to use!
I'm often just cooking for myself, so I don't do that fancy thing other people do where they mix and re-refrigerate a big log of compound butter. Because of that, I usually base my mixtures around either a teaspoon or tablespoon of butter! To me as a total non-cook, that makes it really easy to use my other measuring spoons to make the mixture I want.
It's a pretty easy way to measure it all, but if I'm doing one of my big tasty sirloin steaks, I'll use a tablespoon of butter. So my compound butter mixture looks like this:
- 1 tsbp butter
- 1/4 tbsp minced garlic
- 1/3 tbsp thyme
- 1/3 tbsp rosemary
- 1/4 tbsp beef tallow
I find myself applying it a couple ways:
if I'm getting a sear on my steak over a pan first before putting it on the barbecue for example, I'll put half of the butter on the steak after flipping my steak, one quarter of the steak on one side of the steak once it hits the grill, and then the last quarter on the flipped side on the grill.
If I'm cooking my steak completely on the pan or the barbecue, I'll let the entirety of the butter be set on the flipped side of the steak in the last minute or two of cooking.
Both methods I prioritize the butter only being in contact with the heat source for short amounts of time. I want to ensure I'm not browning or burning my butter! Though if I'm adding beef tallow to the butter too, there's a chance maybe it's raising the smoke point of the butter overall? I haven't experimented much; when I'm dealing with ingredients this expensive, I tend to stick with what I find to work.