Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Brown-Butter Sauce
Brown-Butter Sauce
Place the desired amount of butter in a saucepan and warm it until it takes a rich brown color, but do not let it burn. Pour this sauce over the fish or joint it is served with and add a little vinegar or lemon juice to the pan, pouring this over also, and serve.
A two-ingredient sauce that lives or dies on how far you take the butter. The original gives no quantities, so work backwards from the plate.
- QuantityReckon on about 1 oz (2 tablespoons) of butter per serving, so 4 oz for four portions of fish. The sauce reduces very little, and what looks like too much in the pan is usually right on the plate.
- Use a light-coloured panThe whole judgement is visual. In a stainless or tin-lined pan you can see the milk solids turn from pale gold to hazelnut; in dark nonstick or black cast iron you will overshoot before you notice.
- The hinge: stop it earlyButter goes from brown to acrid in seconds, and the pan carries enough residual heat to keep cooking after you pull it. Take it off the burner while it is a shade lighter than you want and swirl to arrest it, or pour it straight out.
- What "rich brown" meansThe foam subsides, the solids at the bottom turn the colour of a toasted almond, and the smell shifts to nuts and caramel. Clarified butter will not do this at all, since the browning comes from the milk solids the clarifying removes.
- Adding the acidA teaspoon or two of lemon juice or wine vinegar per 4 oz of butter is enough. Add it off the heat and stand back, since the water in it will spit; the acid both seasons and slows the browning.
- Salt and seasoningThe original says nothing about salt. If your butter is unsalted, add a good pinch at the end, and a scrape of black pepper if the dish is a plain poached or grilled one.
- Serve immediatelyThere is no emulsion to hold, so the sauce separates and dulls as it cools, and reheating pushes the solids further toward burnt. Brown the butter last, after the fish is plated.
- "Joint"Here a joint most likely means a roast or large cut of meat rather than a poultry joint. Brown butter suits white fish, brains, sweetbreads and boiled vegetables better than it suits red meat.
This is the French beurre noisette, "hazelnut butter," named for the colour and smell rather than any nut in it; carried further it becomes beurre noir, black butter, the classic partner to skate and to brains. The version with lemon or vinegar swirled into the hot pan is generally treated as a standard accompaniment to poached and fried fish in that tradition, cheap in labour and made at the last minute.