Old-fashioned butter takes center stage.
Chefs milk this fat for all it’s worth, from simple spread to main dish
Five years ago, Adam Dulye of the Abbot’s Cellar and the Monk’s Kettle restaurants in San Francisco wouldn’t dare serve a blue cheese gougere injected with bone marrow butter. Butter was not exactly a dining darling. Now he sells out of the little puff pastries. And he is thrilled.
“Butter is a blank canvas,” he says. “You can take it any direction you want.”
And that’s exactly what Bay Area chefs are doing.
We’re in a buttery moment. Buoyed by a backlash against trans fats and a growing interest in naturally occurring fats, butter sales have been rising since 2005. What was a sometime accompaniment to bread has now become an ingredient with which chefs experiment.
They’re turning local creams into their own house spread, adding unexpected savory and sweet flavorings — even making butter the main ingredient of a starter course. Butter is elemental, pure, simple.
Home cooks may be inspired by these chefs’ ideas: Butter, pure and (almost)
simple: At Homestead in Oakland, Fred Sassen churns homemade creme fraiche into table butter to complement slices of sourdough levain.
“It only seems natural that if we’re spending the effort and time making the bread from scratch that we (also) have the butter from scratch to go with it,” he says. And customers can’t get enough. At least five times a night, Sassen receives requests from diners wanting to buy it.
Cultured butter — made with soured cream — has become the breadbasket favorite at San Francisco restaurants such as Acquerello, Perbacco and Parallel 37.
“There’s substantially more flavor,” says Adam Rosenblum of newcomer Causwells in the Marina. He uses villi bacteria to develop his own culture, which he mixes with Clover organic cream and serves alongside warm house-baked rye Parker House rolls.
Ryan Pollnow of Central Kitchen in the Mission adds an unusual element to his culturing process: Parmesan cheese. He mixes leftover rinds with Straus yogurt and cream, and leaves it to incubate for 24 hours. Another 24 hours in the refrigerator helps develop complexity.
Although cultured butters are often called European style, the terms aren’t necessarily interchangeable. According to Ben Gregersen, co-founder of Sierra Nevada Cheese Co., which makes organic European-style cultured butter, the only difference between the two is butterfat content. A European butter must register at least 82 percent butterfat; the American standard is 80 percent. Yet even this relatively small difference in fat can affect flavor — the higher the percentage of fat, the more flavorful the butter.
But if bread is butter’s life partner, then salt is its best friend. At the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, Andrew Court infuses his butter with Hawaiian black and Murray River pink salts. Central Kitchen opts for a coarse gray sea salt. And Maldon and fleur de sel also make popular garnishes.
Butter mashups: At Abbot’s Cellar, Adam Dulye pulls out a 25-pound bucket of kosher salt stippled with hop cones that look like small yellow flowers. He will use the fragrant salt in various dishes, and reserve the hops to make a sweet butter for topping tomatoes, working into pastry crust or flavoring the salted caramel for the popcorn his staff can’t stop munching. “I threaten to fire people over eating it,” he jokes.
And while some chefs reject the term “compound butter” — it conjures up the image of herby slabs for melting on steak — they embrace the principle. At Aveline and its sister bar the European, Casey Thompson’s butters include a Vegemite version for a brisket burger, sumac for popcorn and bonito for sauteed sea bass.
Asian additions are particularly popular. “I think that with Japanese food especially, butter is the missing ingredient,” says Erik Lowe, chef de cuisine at Fog City in San Francisco, who serves a sake dashi butter sauce with baked clams. At the St. Regis, Olivier Belliard incorporates seaweed and yuzu, while Dirty Habit’s David Bazirgan makes a riff on beurre blanc with raw uni and sake.
Blending butter with a second food like uni or bone marrow also seems to make an impression on diners. “When they read a menu, people will remember one or two keywords from each dish,” Dulye says. In the case of his hangar steak with chanterelle mushrooms, Zinfandel grapes and bone marrow butter on toast, “They’ll remember the bone marrow butter,” he says.
Combining two fatty ingredients may sound like overkill, but in a bacon-infatuated world, it works. Last year, Suzette Gresham-Tognetti of Acquerello served prosciutto pink peppercorn butter on top of guinea hens for the Italian Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma.
“Butter is unique in its ability to enrich whatever it comes into contact with without overshadowing,” she says.
Butter, the star: Matthew Dolan’s staff thought he was crazy when he suggested serving an entire plate of butter at his SoMa spot 25 Lusk. Six months later, diners continue to gape over what he has dubbed A Study of Butter.
Radishes, cornichons, tomatoes and toasted flatbread accompany a rotating selection of specialty butters: powdered brown butter, cow’s milk butter from Sierra Nevada Cheese Co., a sheep’s milk variety from the Wisconsin Sheep Dairy Cooperative, and whipped cured lardo that’s been blended with a little plain butter.
“A really well-made butter is absolutely delicious,” says Dolan. “It can be as complex as cheese.” He compares the sheep’s milk butter to Pecorino and uses it in fondue for rabbit.
Dolan is not the only chef utilizing milk from animals other than the cow.
“Goat butter is phenomenal,” says Gresham-Tognetti of Acquerello. She’s particularly impressed with the goat butter from Meyenburg Goat Milk Products in Turlock. “It’s white, not yellow. It’s clean. It’s distinctive. It tastes more like butter than cow’s butter.”
So is butter merely enjoying its 15 minutes? Dulye doesn’t think so.
“It’s no longer something you just serve with bread,” he says. “It’s something that can completely finish a dish and, in a lot of cases, make the dish.
“Butter is good.”