The 5 Stages of Butter (And How Chefs Use Them)

Many people think that to make something taste great, chefs just add a load of butter. The reality is butter is the one of the most versatile ingredients in our kitchens. Today, I'm going to show you the five different ways we use butter. You often see on recipes adding a specific weight of cold butter, but always wonder why is cold butter important? Like what difference does it make if the butter's cold or hot? And I'm going to show you where it's critical that you use fridge cold butter rather than using room temperature butter. We're going to make a burblanc. So shallot into a pan and then equal parts wine and a good quality vinegar. So reduce this right down until it's syrupy before we add our cold butter. Okay. So our shellot reduction is nice and syrupy. The temperature of the butter basically helps to stabilize the sauce and make sure that all of that butter is properly and gradually incorporated into the sauce. So, if you put warm butter in here, what you would probably get is you would get a thinner emulsion and it would be much more likely to split. Really, really simple rule when you're emulsifying is get something really hot and get something really cold to emulsify in. Does start to get too thick as well, you can just let it down with a little bit more acidity. Lemon juice works really well. Couple of capers, touch more lemon juice. As you can see, we got this really nicely emulsified burblanc. Perfect little sauce for a fish. Colder butter emulsifies slower and controls the dispersal of all of the protein, the lettuceins, all of the fat, and all of the liquid that you're emulsifying into. Most common way that we use butter in the restaurant in its softened state is to make a really nice compound butter. Essentially, what a compound butter is is a is a a multiple myriad of suspended ingredients within that fat. So, the more malleable it is, the more easy it is to suspend those ingredients in there. So, we're going to go in there with a little bit of cayenne, little bit of madras, curry powder, some capers, some anchovies, dijon, one brono shellot, roughly chopped chives, some lemon zest. It's actually a very classic French sauce. sort of known for those in those sort of grand uh Parisian steakouses. 30 seconds for this to come together as a little sauce. Okay. So, what we can see here is this beautiful consistency and it's because of the temperature of the butter that we can easily