No. 584
Saffron Butter
Beurre de Safran
Lay a pinch of saffron on a plate and work it in a nut of butter with a spatula; it is then ready to use.
A one-line compound butter from Ranhofer's kitchen, used as a coloring and flavoring paste rather than a spread. The whole point is dispersion: saffron worked cold into a small amount of butter distributes evenly through a sauce in a way that dry threads stirred into liquid will not.
- A nut of butterRoughly a tablespoon, about 15 g — conventionally the size of a walnut. Compound butters like this one are made in small quantities, generally to be added by the spoonful to finish a sauce.
- A pinch of saffronWith threads, a generous pinch is on the order of 10-20 strands. Ranhofer has you work them on a plate with the spatula; crushing them first in a mortar, alone or with a few grains of salt, helps, since whole threads tend to streak rather than disperse.
- Powdered saffron sold todayCommercial saffron powder is often cut with turmeric or safflower and gives color without the honeyed, iodine-like aroma. Buy threads and crush them yourself if the flavor matters and not just the tint.
- Draw the color out firstSaffron's pigment is water-soluble, not fat-soluble, so butter alone extracts little of it. A few drops of warm water or stock on the crushed threads for ten minutes before working them in gives a far stronger yellow.
- Keep it coldWork the butter soft but never melted, as with any beurre composé. Melted butter separates and the saffron settles out, which defeats the even dispersion the method exists to produce.
- Where it goesWhisk it into a finished velouté, fish sauce, rice or a bouillabaisse-style broth off the heat. Prolonged boiling flattens saffron's aroma, so add it at the end.
- Yield and keepingRolled in parchment it keeps about a week refrigerated and several months frozen; saffron's color holds better than its scent.
Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete professional reference, and its long run of hot and cold butters — ravigote, shallot, anchovy, crayfish, saffron — reflects the French brigade practice of keeping a rank of prepared compound butters at hand so a sauce could be colored, seasoned or enriched to order in seconds. Saffron itself, the dried stigmas of Crocus sativus, was then as now the most expensive spice by weight, which explains both the miserly pinch and the deliberate method: worked into fat, it can be measured and portioned rather than shaken hopefully into a pot. Its use in the nineteenth-century French kitchen leaned heavily on fish and shellfish cookery and on the Provençal dishes, an association that reaches back through medieval European cooking, where saffron was valued at least as much for the gold color it gave a dish as for its taste.