About a week ago I mentioned that I had smoked – amongst other things – some goat’s butter.
I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but the book I was reading said butter smokes well, so I tried it.
Anyway, making lunch for myself, today, and I decided on some scrambled egg. Then I thought “what would it be like made with that smoked butter?”. In for a penny, I decided to give it a try.
Which is why, soon after, I was observed running out to Tim and Nev in the garden, with two tea-spoons full of eggy goodness, saying “you have got to try this!”.
Delicious isn’t the right word.
I was wondering how you smoked scrambled eggs (and whether I really wanted to know!), but butter? Doesn’t it, like, melt? Cheese is bad enough…
I did the butter in my new *cold* smoker – which produces smoke without appreciable heat. However, it did melt a little, as it was a hot day. My first lesson – don’t try to cold smoke on the hottest September day for ages.
Smoke tends to be well absorbed by fat, and as butter is basically a block of fat, it takes it really well. The cheese I smoked, I cut into 1″ strips, but the butter I just left as one block.
That sounds… amazing. There are no words.
Tim’s comment was that it was just like what you get when you cook a good smoked bacon in a pan, and then use the same pan to cook eggs. The taste was quite subtle, but noticeable.
This seems to be a good way to introduce a smokey taste into cooking for times when you don’t want to go to the trouble of smoking. There is some commercially available “liquid smoke” (essentially, smoked water) that can be used this way, but many find that tastes artificial. On current evidence, cold smoked butter does this job better, and butter has a good storage life, in the fridge.
Doing a google last night, I learned that a few famous chefs – including Heston Blumenthal – use smoked butter in some of their sauces.
Ah, I see that I missed several of your posts while I was at FC (odd, I thought I’d gone back to the time I left), among them that you now have a cold-smoker. That would work better.
So how far does the smoke penetrate the butter? I’d have thought that it would be mostly on the outside, as it is with most smoked cheeses. Or do you soften it and mix it in (like with honey-butter)? Since I like smoked cheeses (and like butter) it sounds wonderful. (Hmm, I can just imagine having a set of pots of butter, with honey, garlic, smoke, etc., for different foods…)
It appears to have pretty much penetrated throughout. This was a stick of goat’s butter so is cylindrical, and probably 2-2.5 inches diameter.
I am really getting into experimenting with such things. One of my board game pals who was here today has left me with a pile of walnuts from his tree, which I am going to see if I can find a good recipe for smoking them.
You’ll have to come over one weekend and see what I am up to. If I know in advance, I can make sure I have stuff ready for tasting – most of it requires at least 5 days after smoking for the taste to mature, before which it can be quite bitter.
For anyone wanting to try this themselves, the equipment for cold smoking really isn’t expensive – not like my pellet cooker/hot smoker. See my earlier post of Sept 30th for details.
For those who don’t want to do the cold smoking, but would like to try the result, let me know – either come and visit, or invite me over, and I will bring goodies with me.