Butter'em Up

by Mark R. Vogel

Clarified butter is often preferred to regular butter for sautéing because it has a higher smoke point. This means it can be heated to a higher temperature than regular butter before burning.

Those pesky milk solids are miniature kamikaze pilots, diving right to the bottom of your pan and burning themselves up. Without them, clarified butter will store longer as well. But they are not totally evil. They also provide flavor and thus, clarified butter is not as tasty as regular butter.

But this is only one chapter in the butter story. Butter can do so much more than lubricate your crustaceans. Butter is often used to make roux, a cooked mixture of equal parts butter and flour.

Roux is used to thicken sauces and soups. No cook worth his salt, (pardon the pun), could make gumbo without roux. (Ok yes, you can use okra but classic gumbo always contains roux). In classic French cuisine, roux was the thickener of choice for a multitude of sauces.

Modern sauces are congealed via evaporation from extended heating or by adding in a starch-based thickener such as arrowroot or cornstarch. But if you wish to laugh in the face of fat, favor a more hearty sauce, or simply wish to honor tradition, roux is the way to go.

A delicious preparation employing butter is compound butter. This is simply butter that has been combined with herbs, garlic, shallots, or other flavorings. Simply take a stick or two of butter and allow it to soften to room temperature.

Chop up whatever combination of herbs suits your taste, such as rosemary, thyme, and parsley for example. Then mix them into the butter. Take a sheet of plastic wrap and spoon out the butter into a rough shaped log.

Then roll the plastic around it. Finally, hold each end of the plastic and twist in opposite directions until the plastic tightens around the butter and forces it into a neat cylindrical shape.

Refrigerate it and then slice it to top off your finished steak, pork, lamb, fowl, or fish. You'll never get that garnish with your dinner on the cardiac ward of your local hospital.

And where would fettuccine Alfredo be without butter? An Alfredo sauce is basically a combination of butter, cream and Parmesan cheese. How much of each? I was afraid you'd ask.

I did a search on the Internet and got tired of counting all the permutations. I'd go with four oz., (one stick) of butter, two cups heavy cream, and two cups of Parmesan cheese.

Melt the butter in the cream and bring to a simmer. Incorporate the cheese and season with salt and pepper. Cook your pasta until it is just a minute or two from being done and then finish it in the sauce.