The Kitchen · № 06
Vanilla brown butter
Beurre noisette is classical. The vanilla in it is not; it is simply the most useful thing on this page.
Where this comes from
Let us be straight about this one. Beurre noisette is a classical French technique, older than anyone's memory: butter cooked until the milk solids toast and it smells of hazelnuts, which is what noisette means. Putting vanilla into it is modern, and we are not going to invent a lineage for it.
It earns its place for a simpler reason. It is the most useful vanilla preparation in a kitchen and the shortest route to understanding why vanilla belongs on savoury food. Spoon it over scallops, cauliflower, or a steak, and the argument makes itself.
Beurre noisette: classical French technique. The vanilla: modern, and ours.Ingredients
- 250 g unsalted butter
- 1 Ox & Orchid vanilla pod
- A pinch of fine salt
Method
Split the pod and scrape the seeds. Keep both.
Melt the butter in a light-coloured pan. You need to see the colour, so not black steel and not non-stick.
It will foam, then quieten, then the milk solids on the base will begin to colour. Swirl the pan; do not stir. Watch it: pale to hazelnut takes about four minutes, and hazelnut to burnt takes about forty seconds.
The moment it smells of toasted nuts and the solids are golden brown, pull it off the heat and drop in the pod and the seeds. The residual heat is what infuses it.
Add the salt. Leave it to cool with the pod still in it, at least 20 minutes.
Use it warm, or pour it into a jar, solids and all, and keep it in the fridge for a fortnight. It sets solid; warm it to use.
The grader’s note
The mistake is adding the vanilla too early. Vanillin is volatile and it does not like a hot pan: put the pod in at the start and you boil off the top notes and keep only the bitterness. Off the heat, always. And do not strain out the toasted milk solids. They are where the nuttiness lives, and they are the half of this that makes people ask what you did.
Made with
Grade A Indonesian planifolia.
Every recipe here is written for a real bean: graded, signed, and sold by weight.