Fancy gift thats a lot easier than it looks.

A “compound butter” is basically when you soften butter to room temperature, mix in some flavors, often a fresh herb, and chill it back to harden, allowing the fats in the butter to absorb those flavors like a sponge. If you look up recipes for them, you’ll usually see someone rolling the butter mixture into a log shape between parchment paper, that always looked kinda hard to pull off for some reason, so I thought to use the musubi press that was collecting dust in my kitchen after the great musubi rush of 2015. I think a well cooked chanterelle is probably my favorite mushroom flavor, truly the “rib eye steak” of ‘shrooms for me. What a great way to preserve the very expensive and very perishable chanterelle for a couple weeks in the fridge. I really like the presentation of putting a slice of the butter on a hot dish and watching it melt. Serve it on grilled corn, cut off the cob in a bowl, make insane scrambled eggs with it, obviously on some good toast, finish a burger with it, or on a roasted a sweet potato with some chives. If you let it sit overnight in the fridge, the flavors will get 10 times better than just waiting an hour.

Equipment

Musubi Press

Saute pan

Ingredients

1 stick of unsalted butter (4oz or ½ cup) Softened

½ large shallot finely diced

1 large garlic clove, minced

1 oz chanterelle mushroom (by weight)

¼ tsp kosher salt

Pinch of cayenne pepper

Directions

1. The morning you plan on making this, pull your butter out of the refrigerator to soften. If you’re cool or european, skip this step, as your butter was already on the counter next to those eggs
2. Finely dice the shallot, mince the garlic, and dice the mushroom, not too too small though as you’ll want some luxurious chunks
3. Heat a saute pan or skillet to medium heat, cut off 1 tbsp of butter from the stick, and sautee the shallot and garlic for about a minute, make sure its not going too fast and hot, if you burn the garlic, the mushroom flavor will become quickly overpowered
4. Now add the mushrooms, cayenne, and salt. Cook down for 5 minutes or so, keep everything moving and stirred pretty often, lower the heat if you see the shallots and garlic getting too dark
5. When everything looks good and cooked up, immediately add the mushroom mixture to a medium bowl with your butter. Stir everything up thoroughly, the heat from the mushrooms with help soften the butter more and make it easier to mix, without melting it too far and turning it liquid
6. Carefully spoon the butter mixture into a musubi press, perhaps on a sheet or parchment paper for storing later, and let cool and harden for a couple hours minimum, overnight is optimal for flavor though
7. The most fun part about this is slowly and carefully pressing the butter brick out of the press, enjoy that moment for me