What is Brown Butter? (2024)

FAQs

What is Brown Butter? ›

What Is Brown Butter? Brown butter, also known as buerre noisette in French, is made by heating butter until the milk solids caramelize, imparting a golden color and toasted, nutty flavor. The French technique is an easy way to ramp up the flavor of regular butter without adding any extra ingredients.

Brown butter, also known as beurre noisette, is made by cooking unsalted butter long enough to turn the milk solids brown while cooking out any water present in the butter. Often described as tasting nutty or toasty, it has a deeper, richer, more intense flavor than melted or clarified butter.

Brown butter is regular butter cooked a bit longer than usual until the milk solids toast and turn brown. You'll cook the butter just past the melting point. Browning butter creates a magical toasty flavor you don't get with regular melted butter.

For my vegan take on brown butter, I turned to pecans, which already have an affinity with dairy butter (hello, butter pecan everything). And when they're cooked, they develop compounds called pyrazines that impart, to my palate at least, a roasted nut flavor that's similar enough to conventional brown butter.

While brown butter has a subtle sweet taste and creamy texture, ghee too has a similar texture, but has a neutral taste. The nutty and earthy taste of this butter used in cooking and baking cookies, chocolate sauces, adds a nice taste to egg and fish delicacies. However, ghee has been used in several ways.

In its purest form, brown butter tastes like toffee, a little sweet and savory with a heady caramel aroma. Chemically, brown butter tastes so good for the same reason a seared steak does: a process called the Maillard reaction that describes the breakdown of animal proteins into hundreds of flavor compounds.

Brown butter is not a health food, but it is not as bad as some people make it out to be either. Like all forms of butter, it is high in fat and calories. However, brown butter does contain some vitamins and minerals, such as vitamin A, vitamin D, and calcium. In moderation, brown butter can be part of a healthy diet.

Reminiscent of overcooked microwave popcorn, burnt butter smells pungent and slightly metallic. Burnt butter will have black debris floating in a sea of brown liquid. While this may be difficult to detect in dark or coated pans, you will see it quickly by pouring the butter into a clear or light colored heat safe dish.

Chill the butter in the refrigerator until totally solid, about 1 hour, then get ready for longer-term storage. Pre-browned butter can be stored in airtight containers in the fridge for up to two weeks, but it'll last for up to three months in the freezer.

Begin stirring to move the butter around as it melts. Once melted, the butter will begin to foam and sizzle around the edges. Keep stirring. In about 5–8 minutes from when you started (depending on the amount of butter you used), the butter will turn golden brown.

Why is my brown butter so foamy? ›

Butter contains a good 13 to 17% water, which has to go before the fat's temperature can rise enough to brown the milk proteins. Once the butter reaches a temperature of 212°F, the water in the butter starts to evaporate much more quickly. As a result the butter will start to bubble and splatter dramatically.

Beurre noisette (French pronunciation: [bœʁ nwazɛt], literally: hazelnut butter, loosely: brown butter) is a type of warm sauce used in French cuisine. It can accompany savoury foods, such as winter vegetables, pasta, fish, omelettes, and chicken.

You can use either salted or unsalted. We like using unsalted butter, especially for baking, because you can control the quantity of salt in your dish.

As the butter gently melts and cooks, the flavor, color, and aroma changes right before your eyes. Brown butter adds a rich, slightly nutty, caramel flavor to baked goods that makes everything extra delicious.

There is a very small window during the browning process to overcook the butter, so you will want to pay close attention. Black specks indicate burnt milk proteins which will give a bitter taste to your recipe. If this happens, no worries it has happened to all of us. Dump the butter and start the process over.

The milk solids, those white foamy bits, will begin to brown as the butter continues to cook. They're the key to the delicious flavour, so you'll want to ensure an even browning by continually whisking the butter or swirling it in the pan. Avoid letting those milk solids burn at the bottom.

Brown specks in brown butter are toasted milk solids. They're actually where most of the flavor comes from, so make sure you scrape those out of the pan along with the liquid butter. Don't strain out the specks. Trust me, you want it all in your recipe!