Compound Interest

Early mornings in Tel Aviv’s soul food kitchen are devoted to two things: early shopping in the marketplace and advance prep work. The latter usually involves things that help set up much of our slow, southern cooking: prepping brines for chicken and fish, making clarified butter, preparing various bbq sauces, etc. One of my favorite things to do as part of pre-prep is to make compound butters, especially maitre d’hotel butter, which is typically used to finish meat dishes.

The “recipe” for maitre d’hotel butter, or any compound butter for that matter, is simple: let a good hunk a butter sit out at room temperature for about 30 minutes, mix in your favorite aromatics (in this case chopped parsley, with some lemon zest and lemon juice and sea salt), mix it all up, shape into a log, roll in plastic wrap, and pop in the freezer. You simply slice off whatever you need later on, careful of course to remove the cellophane covering.

Multiple interests collide here on the subject of compound butters. For one, sometimes it’s a bitch and a bit of a stretch to find interesting things to blog about all the time. Let’s be honest. But on top of that obviousness, I marvel at how satisfying doing very simple things can be. It is a great way to start my day in the kitchen, in fact start any day. On top of that, I am always amazed at what happens to the taste of butter (a fat), when you layer it with lemon (acid), aromatics (parsley), and simple sea salt. And on top of that, I am always blown away by how my dishes take on a whole new level of complexity when finished with a compound butter.

That’s a lot of bang for your buck, so early in the morning.