Maître d’Hôtel Butter

Maître d’Hôtel Butter

Well, I blogged about how to make cheddar a couple of days ago. I realise not everyone may be up for that so I've decided to do something that's also relatively impressive but easy and not as time consuming. I'll explain how to make the butter yourself from cream, but if you're feeling lazy and just want some awesome compound butter then buy some unsalted butter, leave it out to get to room temperature and soften, and pick this up from where I added the seasonings.

So, making the butter. I didn't want loads of the stuff so I just started off with half a pint of double cream at room temperature.

Pour this into a nice large mason jar. It needs to have plenty of room to slosh about in there.

Now screw the lid on tight and shake up and down for all your worth. The cream will coat the inside of the jar as you'd expect and quite quickly you'll notice the consistency change. The cream will stop sloshing about, at this point you have made whipped cream. Keep going (it's a great workout) until you feel it change again and something is thudding about in the jar in a thin liquid. It took me 15 minutes solid shaking to get to this point. The solid mass is butter and the liquid is buttermilk. Another good indication is the cream that was coating the inside of the jar will be washed off by the butter and buttermilk.

Pour the buttermilk out and fill the jar with cold water. Wash this around a bit and pour it out again.

You need to do this over and over until the water runs clear.

It's important you get all the buttermilk out of the butter. If there's any left in there it'll go sour, so get the butter out and using a spoon or your hands press the butter and squeeze out all the buttermilk.

Join in here if you've just gone out and bought butter! We're going to add the other ingredients and transform this plain old ordinary butter into Maître d’Hôtel butter. The yield I got from my 1/2 pint of cream was 55g of butter.

Ingredients 1 generous pinch of salt
1 pinch of fresh ground pepper
1 tsp of flat leaf parsley
1/2 tsp paprika
1 tsp lemon juice

Stir in the lemon juice first, then add all the rest of your ingredients.

Roll your butter up in greaseproof paper and twist the ends into a sort of bon bon shape.

Now just put it in the fridge to harden and in an hour or so you'll have a nice solid finished butter.

I warn you, this stuff is addictive. It's delicious melted over vegetables or fish, but I'm more than happy just spreading it on toast as a snack. 55 grams won't last long enough to go off in my fridge, but I recon it would keep for a week or so if I wasn't eating it.