A recipe from the Australian Financial Review!
SIMPLE, BUT THEN AGAIN, NOT SO SIMPLE EITHER
The Australian Financial Review has been an intriguing source of ideas for this blog in the past, but never more so than this time. This weekend's edition had an article about a Lebanese Noma chef giving cooking lessons to Syrian refugees in Lebanon. So the article was not really about cooking but the reporter sat in on one of these lessons which was showing the women how to make pasta - ordinary enough - but then how to serve that pasta - with a sauce made from smoked butter and smoked water!
Smoked butter! Smoked water! But it sounded so simple - just three ingredients so I thought I would check it out on the web - and found that it's a super trendy ingredient with the like of Heston Blumenthal and Americans from Seattle. So how do you do it? And what do you do with it?
Well first of all you can buy it. Well I'm not sure that you can here. I don't think any butter producers in Australia make it, so you would have to look overseas although maybe some very specialist food shops would have some. But I bet it would cost a fortune. Besides it seems relatively simple to make. In America they seem to have some sort of blow torch kind of thing that you use, but I'm sure this is not the best way to go about it. Here's how the AFR described what Tarek Alameddine, the Noma chef, did:
"He put wet kindling on the fire to smoke and made a tent out of an upturned saucepan and tin foil. 'Ten or fifteen minutes, not more, or it will be bitter, move it out of the heat, if you need, the butter will soften a bit, but it shouldn't melt.' A bowl of water was infused in the same way."
I should note that the butter was frozen and that he worked on a charcoal brazier - presumable with a grid on the top.
I also read of lots of other ways that people did the smoking with tins, saucepans, woks, foil and smoking units, wood chips and charcoal. I guess you could also do it in a Weber - next time you Weber something give it a go. And I actually think that for the home Australian cook this would be the easiest way. And if you don't want to use it all yourself you can wrap it decoratively like one blogger did and give it to people as presents!
There are lots of suggestions of what to do with the smoked butter once made - and also as the picture at the top of the page suggests, you can smoke any kind of flavoured butter. Let your imagination run wild there. Basically you can use it any way you would use ordinary butter, but it's said to have a wonderful taste. I found a lovely little story about the Queen, who was visiting a dairy in England, and they had smoked butter. She was heard to mutter "Smoked butter! Never heard of it!" So some was packaged up and sent to Buckingham Palace. A week later an order came for more and the dairy was given the royal sign of approval.
Back to the AFR recipe though. When he had smoked his butter and water he:
"heated the smoked water to 60 degrees and churned in the butter. It whipped up like mayonnaise and taste divine. He tossed it into the pasta with handfuls of pumpkin seeds."
This sounds so simple. I assumed that 'churned in the butter' means that he whipped it in. It's simple like that Roman dish of pepper and pecorino pasta (another time) which is also an amazingly and surprisingly delicious dish. I like the idea of the pumpkin seeds as well.
I found one other recipe on the net - Massimiliano Alajmo's Pappardelle with smoked butter and herbs. Don't think there are enough out there yet to call it a trend though.
There were actually three or four food related stories in the AFR this weekend. Might visit another one another time. But then again maybe not. This one was the most intriguing.
