Ruhlman's Twenty (19 page)

10
/Using the hand blender with the whisk attachment, you can add as much oil as you wish—just make sure you have lemon juice or water in proportion to maintain the emulsion.

11
/This is a broken mayonnaise—pourable and unappetizing.

THE SUBTITLE TO THIS CHAPTER,
immortal I pray, was written by Fernand Point, chef proprietor of La Pyramide, one of the great restaurants of the twentieth century. A man of extraordinary generosity, he trained a generation of the chefs who would transform French cuisine. He was not only a gifted cook and chef, but an observant and thoughtful man, as his cookbook-cum-memoir,
Ma Gastronomie,
clearly shows.

“The duty of a good cuisinier is to transmit to the generations who will replace him, everything he has learned and experienced.”

“Success is the sum of a lot of little things done correctly.”

“Before judging a thin man, one must get some information. Perhaps he was once fat.”

Point was a large man in every way, and there’s no better reflection of his spirit and his culinary wisdom than his exclamation on butter. Every chef knows why he would say such a thing. This magical, mystical gift from the cow makes almost everything taste better.

As chefs also know, and preach,
fat is flavor,
and few fats are as flavorful or as useful as this dairy fat. Slowly and surely, America is learning that fat is not bad, that it might even be good, that fat doesn’t make us fat. (What does? Eating too much! Surprise!)

Butter is the most useful and most common fat for cooking and eating, and understanding how to use it makes you a better cook. Butter sits in a covered dish on the kitchen counter, is offered wrapped in foil in a dish of ice at a hotel buffet, and is stacked in boxes in the refrigerator case at the grocery store. This easy availability is yet another facet of its usefulness. Unlike other flavorful fats, such as duck fat or mascarpone, butter is always on hand. But because it is ubiquitous, we scarcely stop to think about how truly valuable it is.

Thinking about butter allows us to see it, and use it, as a tool. It shortens the dough that will hold your pie filling or form the cookie you serve with tea. It enriches a sponge cake and also becomes part of the frosting on that cake. It cooks and flavors the meat in your roasting pan/tray. Basting the meat with butter simultaneously helps the meat cook and flavors it, then enriches the pan sauce you later make for the meat. The solids in butter take on extraordinary flavors when gently browned. Butter is a ready-made sauce—serve it soft with a roast chicken, along with a little Dijon mustard. Add aromatics, such as a little shallot and lemon, and it becomes a more complex sauce. Knead some flour into butter, and the mixture becomes the perfect thickener for sauce.

Butter is critical in the sweet kitchen; indeed, it’s hard to imagine a pastry kitchen without it. When asked about butter’s single most important attribute in the pastry kitchen, chef and writer David Lebovitz said, “For me, the most important quality of butter is its flavor. Since baked goods usually have few ingredients, the flavor of the butter is paramount. A second important effect butter brings to doughs and batters is aeration—fluffing up the butter with the sugar creates air pockets that cause cakes, and other batters, to rise so nicely.”

Butter is every bit as critical in the savory kitchen. As Tony Bourdain, chef, writer, and television personality, puts it, “In a professional kitchen, it’s almost always the first and last thing in a pan.” Butter is a great cooking medium, flavoring and giving color to sautés. Added at the end, it completes a dish, making it more luscious, and it smoothes out the texture and flavor of the finished sauce
(see technique #11, Sauce).

Here is a truism that makes the uncertainties and stresses of life a little more manageable: few things cannot be made better with the
addition of a little (more) butter. All cooks should rejoice in this happy circumstance.

To harness the magic of butter, you need to know its parts and how those parts work. Butter is primarily milk fat, 80 percent usually. The fat is what contributes great flavor and texture to so many foods. This fat is hard and opaque at room temperature but melts into translucency. When the fat is separated from the other components of butter, it can be heated to 400°F/200°C before it starts to smoke, which makes it a superlative medium for cooking. Butter fat will do things that other fats do—shorten or make more tender a dough or pastry crust, add richness and flavor to a sauce, or be the main component of a sauce. Water makes up about 15 percent of butter. This is why butter is soft and spreadable at room temperature; pure butter fat is not. Water is what makes it froth when you heat butter in a pan, and it is what keeps the pan cool. The remaining weight of butter is composed of solids (proteins, salts, lactose). Once the water has been cooked out of butter, these solids become brown and flavorful, but they can turn black and bitter if you cook them too long.

Think about the three components that make the butter, and you will have more control over your cooking and a better understanding of why your food is behaving as it does.

As a cooking medium, butter has a few different tiers of use. The first is simply gentle heating. Melt a little butter over medium-low heat and cook food in it until the food is heated through—this can be an egg, a thin piece of fish, or green beans that you’ve boiled and shocked
(see technique #20, Chill).

Raising the heat a little alters the situation. The higher heat cooks off the water in the butter more rapidly. Once that happens, the butter solids brown, and some adhere to the food, coloring it and flavoring it. The only thing to do once this happens is to make sure the solids don’t burn. One of the advantages of cooking food this way is that the butter can be used as a baste. Basting, spooning butter over what you’re cooking, does two things: it flavors the food with the butter fat and the browning butter solids, and it cooks the food from the top down while the hot pan cooks it from the bottom up.

You can use butter to cook at very high temperatures—it is a very effective cooking
fat—but you must first remove the solids that would otherwise turn black and ruin the butter. The process is called
clarifying
butter. As butter is melted over low heat, the solids rise to the top and are spooned away as the water cooks off until all you are left with is pure butter fat. Clarified butter is wonderful for sautéing fish and beef, and it may be the best fat for cooking potatoes.

The fourth level of butter as a cooking method is using it as a poaching liquid. Butter is whisked into a bit of water and melted to retain the solids, water, and butter fat in a homogenous but liquid state. This dense, flavorful medium cooks food very gently and is thus well suited to cooking ingredients that need gentle heat such as
lobster or shrimp
. (See also Using Whole Liquid Butter, following.)

When we combine butter and flour, the butter shortens the strands of gluten that make some flour-based preparations chewy, such as bread, resulting in a tender crumb, which you want in a pastry crust or in shortbread. The reason to choose butter as opposed to another fat, such as lard or vegetable shortening or even olive oil (a fat that’s fluid at room temperature), is flavor. The flavor of butter is a natural partner for flour. Try the shortbread for a vivid expression of this.

Remember that butter is composed of 15 percent water, which encourages the formation of gluten, especially with a lot of kneading. Gluten is desirable in a bread or a noodle, but not in a pie crust. Butter will thus have less shortening power than the same weight of a pure fat, such as lard.

One of the wonderful components of butter is the milk solids, which turn brown as they cook and develop rich nutty, salty, sweet flavors. These flavors enhance the taste of many foods, especially starchy foods. Pasta, bread, potatoes, polenta, and risotto all make a great canvas for the complexity of brown butter. Brown butter is a traditional sauce for lean white fish, seasoned with lemon juice and parsley, a preparation called à la meunière (mew-nee-AIR). The
roasted cauliflower
owes most of its deliciousness to the butter that melts down through the florets, browns in the pan, and then flavors the cauliflower as a baste. Brown butter pairs perfectly with sweet pastries, creams, and cakes. You can even try browned butter on popcorn. It’s fabulous.

The only thing you need to be careful about is overcooking the butter, in which case it goes from brown to black, and black rarely tastes good. When you know that the butter in your refrigerator can be transformed into a versatile, delectable sauce, you have a last-minute way to finish almost any dish.

If you take care not to let the water and solids separate from the fat when you melt butter, you will have a product completely different from butter in any other form. In restaurant kitchens, it’s often referred to as
beurre monté
(burr mohn-TAY), “mounted butter,” from the French phrase
monter au beurre,
to mount, or whisk, butter into a sauce. The butter is ready to enrich sauces at the last minute when the kitchen is busy and time is tight. It also makes a great baste and an incomparable cooking medium.

Beurre monté
is made by whisking chunks of butter into a tablespoon or two of hot water over medium heat. Butter is already an emulsification of fat and water. By melting the butter this way, you maintain the emulsion so that the butter is liquid but opaque, creamy, and homogenous. If you were simply to melt the butter without the continual whisking, the clear fat would separate from the water and solids.

As a cooking medium,
beurre monté
is especially suited to foods that require gentle
heat, especially lobster and shrimp. Lean, firm white fish such as halibut are likewise excellent poached in butter. It can be spooned over pan-roasted meats as a baste, and it can be added to sauces in the same way that whole solid butter is swirled into sauces.

Most hot, stock-based sauces are improved when you finish them by swirling in a little butter just before serving. In professional kitchen parlance, this is called mounting a sauce with butter, or
monté au beurre.
The butter smoothes out the texture of the sauce, making it more voluptuous and satisfying.

If you work an equal volume of flour into solid butter, you will have something called kneaded butter,
beurre manié
(burr man-YAY), which is whisked into a sauce. A loose, broth-like sauce will become opaque and thicken as the flour grains, separated from one another by a coating of butter, expand in the hot liquid. It’s a terrific way to enrich a sauce while improving its texture.

One of the best ways to put the qualities of butter to work is as a garnish. Butter and mustard make a great finish for a roasted chicken. Radishes with butter are a traditional French hors d’oeuvre. Butter on bread is even a kind of garnish.

A preparation called compound butter is a terrific do-ahead garnish for most grilled/barbecued or roasted meats and fish. Simple to make, it can be varied according to your whim. Let the butter soften, then mix in aromatics, fresh herbs, minced shallot, or lemon. One traditional variation is
“hotel butter”—
beurre maître d’hôtel
—
which includes parsley, shallot, and lemo. Compound butter is usually rolled into a log using plastic wrap/cling film, then is sliced and placed atop hot meat or fish, over which it slowly melts. For a grilled steak, I like to make a
compound butter with chipotle chiles, cilantro/fresh coriander, shallot, and lime juice
.

In the same way that duck fat and lard are used to make confits—poaching duck or pork in fat, then allowing it to cool submerged in the fat, preserving the meat—butter can act as a preserver. My friend and teacher Michael Pardus suggests a couple of approaches to using butter for this purpose.

You can make salmon confit by poaching a salmon fillet in
beurre monté
that’s about 145° to 150°F/63° to 65°C. A thin piece will take about 5 minutes, a thick piece about 7 minutes. Let the salmon cool in the pan. Or transfer it to a dish and pour the butter in the pan over the salmon so that it is completely submerged. Refrigerate the salmon until you’re ready to use it. It can be warmed and eaten as is, or you can make salmon rillettes: bring it to room temperature and stir it so that it shreds, season with salt and lemon, add some of the poaching butter, and then put the salmon in a ramekin and pour a layer of butter on top.

The preservative effects of butter also work with summer berries. Beat room-temperature butter with a rubber spatula until soft and creamy. Stir in berries as if making a berry compound butter. Roll the butter into a log with plastic wrap/ cling film and freeze to use later in the year for baking, making a sauce, garnishing, or finishing a dessert. “Berry compound butter on waffles is awesome!” Pardus exclaims.