How to Clarify Butter

To paraphrase Clarence from True Romance, it's better to have clarified butter and not need it than need clarified butter and not have it.

A quick primer on butter that one can learn in culinary school (or on Wikipedia): butter consists of butter fat, milk solids, and water. When you cook with butter and it starts to burn in the pan – like by the time you get to the third pancake – it's actually the milk solids burning. Clarified butter is butter sans milk solids and water.

In other words, unadulterated buttery goodness. And because it's a fat, it'll keep for eons. Pour it into a jar and throw it in the fridge for a rainy day. As a cooking oil, it has a really high smoke point. I find it easier to make hollandaise with it. Or use it simply as a dip for steamed shellfish like the Red Lobsters of the world do.

Ingredients

• 1 lb. unsalted butter 

*Of course you can make more, but I wouldn't bother making less.

Equipment

• small saucepot
• ladle
• strainer
• cheesecloth (or coffee filter or paper towel)
• bowl to dump milk solids into
• jar or plastic container with tight-fitting lid

Prepping

Plop the butter into the saucepot. Well done, chef.

Cooking

Melt the butter over medium heat.

Almost immediately, the butter will separate into its component parts. Skim the white milk solids off with a ladle. Try not to take any fat with it. After a certain point, it helps to let the milk solids bubble up and drift to the sides of the pot before skimming. If you're using this immediately, now's a good time to multitask.

Adjust the heat accordingly so the butter isn't at a rapid boil, lest the milk solids burn. You'll probably get most of them out before all the water evaporates. If the butter is still bubbling, then there's still water in the pot. Eventually, it'll look something like this…

It will smell warm and nutty and buttery. Refrain from bathing in it. If only because it's super hot.

Some of the milk solids will have stuck to the bottom of the pot and browned a bit. Try not to scrape them up. Ladle the clarified butter through a strainer lined with cheesecloth. 

Different butter producers may vary in their ratios, but (at least here in the US) you should have something in the vicinity of 12 oz. of clarified butter. Pour into your food storage container of choice (you may want to let it cool if using plastic).

Day 22: How to Save Hollandaise

A few weeks back, I tried and failed to make hollandaise sauce. I'd read in several places that one could save a broken hollandaise by adding warm water a little at a time and whisking like your life depended on it. As it turns out, this is not the case.

For the record, my hollandaise in class didn't break – apparently, recipes that say to make your sauce over low heat are chock full of lies. Get water boiling, then place your double boiler and turn the heat off. So that helped.

But if it did break, we were taught to get a new bowl, whisk a new egg yolk, then stream the broken sauce into the new bowl. A few people did this and it worked just fine.

Ideally, once saved, one should have a poached egg to drown in your luscious, creamy, buttery sauce.

Day 14: Monter au Beurre

The butter we didn't use.

"This is not a healthy cooking school."

Our chef-instructor was making two simple pan gravies from the drippings of roasted chicken and roasted guinea fowl. In went some stock, garlic, and some other herbs. He reduced both and explained monter au beurre, proof again that everything sounds glorious in French.

Monter is mount. Beurre is butter. So, basically, monter au beurre means add the caloric equivalent of a solid fuel rocket booster to enrich and finish a sauce. "This is French cooking," said our instructor.

And it was good. Really good.

We did more tournés today, which we actually roasted, somewhat mitigating my mounting contempt for tournés. They're like crispy little blimps.

We also minced parsley, a sneaky hard task if done properly. In the past, when I've chopped/minced parsley, it always ended up a little moist, and today I learned why. A standard up-and-down rocking chop on parsley results in bruising the leaves, causing moisture to leech out. Adding a little forward-backward slicing motion helps avoid this, and enabled us to make a dust-like minced parsley that's much easier to sprinkle.

On roasted chicken, say, or butter-enriched pan sauce. Like how the French do.

Guinea fowl pan sauce with pearl onions and, yes, finished with butter.

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Day 12: No Pain, No Mayo

I discovered a new workout: hand-whipping mayonnaise. It's better than the Lap-Band at toning the shoulders, plus it comes with the bonus of having mayonnaise to slather on sandwiches or dip fries in, if you're a kooky European-type person who's into that kind of thing.

I'm actually not much of a mayo person unless it's an aioli, which I learned is simply basic mayo made with olive oil, plus garlic. Which, yes, I have enjoyed whilst eating some lovely, crispy fries.

After my recent hollandaise fail, I was concerned I'd also screw up the mayo. Thankfully, mayonnaise needs no cooking, just the ability to stream oil into a bowl while whisking as if the continued rotation of the Earth, and by extension life itself, depended on one's ability to emulsify egg yolks with oil.

I actually went lefty because it took so long and my shoulder started to hurt, but the result is much tastier than store-bought mayo and head-and-shoulders better than Miracle Whip, which I'm pretty sure contains neither miracles nor whip. I'm starting to think, in the culinary world, pain and taste are never too far apart.

Vinegar, mustard, egg yolk, oil. Whisk until arm falls off. Voilà.

We also watched our chef instructor make two different roux for two different sauces; white roux for béchamel, blond roux for velouté. While I've made roux and béchamel a few times in the past, I did learn a good rule of thumb for roux: after mixing the fat (e.g. butter) and the flour together, a proper roux should have the consistency of wet sand.

Velouté and béchamel sauces.

Another neat little factoid is the difference between a gravy and a sauce. A gravy utilizes natural fat, like pan drippings from a roasted turkey, while a sauce uses butter or lard. Sure, that's not the type of information that makes one a genius cook, but it's one of those things that always gnawed at me, like the difference between a stock and broth.

How Not To Do It: Hollandaise

I wish cookbooks would illustrate what failure looks like. Especially with the tricky recipes.

With that in mind, here's what completely screwed up hollandaise sauce looks like. The Wife made cupcakes last Sunday that needed egg whites. Since we had leftover egg yolks, and I was planning on making tilapia and asparagus for dinner, I figured I'd make a go at hollandaise.

As with any cooking involving egg yolks (pudding, ice cream base, etc.), you can't make it too hot and you've got to really keep it moving. Even with the double boiler thing, I think I went too hot. Anyway, this is what curdled, broken hollandaise looks like. You're supposed to be able to save it by adding additional teaspoons of hot water and whisking, but… yeah, no…

Welcome to the City of Failed Hollandaise. Population: soft scrambled egg, melted butter, lemon juice, and water. It smelled fantastic, at least.