Butter

I have eaten butter all my life, but never in a million years would I use copious amount of this stuff until I did my chef training. French classical training does use a generous use of butter in different dishes, obviously not used willy nilly. Butter has a distinctive way to add flavour, gloss and enrichment to many dishes, from baking to sauces to melting over a piece of meat.

I still remember growing up in Hong Kong, there was and still is a local culture of neighbourhood cafes and eateries, they are called “Cha Chaan Taang”, or tea-restaurant. Each establishment offers a wide variety of drinks, they might have their own special blends of tea, served with evaporated milk or condensed milk. There is also a hybrid drink that might put off an English person: a mix of tea and coffee in the same cup, served with either type of milk poured straight from a tin. This drink is called “yin-yang”. You can have it hot or ice cold, whichever tickles your fancy. I tell you though, the caffeine in these strong teas and coffees are enough to wake you up with a zing. These are not connoisseur level kind of beverages, the blends don’t come with provenance nor they are single estate beans or handpicked leaf tips at the crack of dawn. But they are typical Hong Kong style drinks and the locals love them. I’m told that even after years of living abroad, many still miss the familiar taste and the “smoothness” in these drinks.

So what has this got to do with butter? Well, when we drink these, we always order something to go with it. Usually they are toasts, but thick cut, always made from white bread and always crust-less. The toppings for these toasts are typically jam (only one type: apricot jam), or peanut butter (Skippy brand!), or condensed milk or just plain unadorned slabs, yes slabs of thick cut salted butter. You might baulk at the generous serving of butter, but in a strange kind of way, as you bite into the toasted bread with still a soft centre, and your teeth sink into the cold, creamy and slightly salty but also sweet butter, it is rather fun. Multi texture and temperatures dancing on your palate. These drinks and foods are full of contradictions. In the West we would not entertain using the same cafetiere to make coffee and tea. If you did, somehow you will still taste the coffee in the tea; nor would we enjoy rock hard butter on hot toast. But in Hong Kong, there are no rules for these.

As I cook with butter, I have also come across ghee. Ghee is actually clarified butter, you can buy jars of it, like I do (see photo), this brand is made in the West Country. It is a game changer in any Indian curries and biryanis. You can also make ghee yourself, just give it time and a large enough pan to melt blocks, indeed, blocks of salted butter. Slowly melt the butter until it becomes liquid, like yellow gold with the white milky solids separated. The liquid yellow fat is the clarified butter and you can decant it (without the milky solids) into a jar and this will keep in a cool place in the kitchen out of sunlight for up to a week. Longer than this I would put it in the fridge. Clarified butter is a butter that has a high smoking point, meaning it can withstand a higher temperature e.g. frying without burning. This is because the milky white solids have been removed, these solids is the stuff that burns easily.

You can also make flavoured butter, by first softening the salted butter, add your choice of chopped herbs and spices, such as thyme, parsley, dried red chilli flakes and sweet smoked paprika, mix well and put the mixture on a piece of greaseproof paper, roll up into a cylinder and put it in the fridge to harden. Delicious sliced to top just cooked steaks and even baked potatoes. Personally, I love the Normandy Isigny de Mere, another French Normandy brand, President, Danish Lurpak and Irish Kerrygold. I would definitely look for a tasty butter to spread on crusty baguettes and flavoursome sourdough toasts, but otherwise I buy supermarket own brands for cooking and baking.

Finally, on a sweet note. Did you wonder why in a lot of baking recipes, unsalted butter is called for, and yet they also specify a little added salt in a sweet recipe? A simple answer is this: typically in every 100g of salted butter, there is between 1.7-2g of salt. In a standard Victoria Sponge type of cake, the recipe calls for 225g each of self raising flour, caster sugar, unsalted butter and 4 eggs. 225g is nearly one whole block of butter (250g) from a UK supermarket, that means there is between 3.8-4.5g of salt. 5g is about a teaspoonful, this is far too much in a cake. But a sweet recipe still needs a little salt, because salt brings out the flavour of foods. This is a true “seasoning”, whereby it brings out the natural flavours of the ingredients, rather than enhancing it by adding other elements into a dish.

So there you are, a little roundabout blog on the humble but essential butter. There really isn’t anything quite like it.