jean’s kitchen

Garlic Butter

By JEAN DOHERTY/LE PATIO

In Burgundy they eat their snails swimming in delicious, garlicky parsley butter, spearing them from their shells with cute two-pronged forks made just for that purpose. But beurre d’escargots is not just for snails. It can be spread on warm crusty bread, a knob can be set to melt on a freshly seared steak, and we will then have “beurre Matire D’Hotel.” It can be spread on cod to be baked in papillote, melted over potatoes and lots more. It keeps for weeks, if you don’t find uses for it all at once, and it also freezes very well.

Ingredients:

• 1 kilo of butter
• 20 grams coarse sea salt
• 1 gram of ground black pepper
• 50 grams crushed garlic (don’t forget to take out the germ in the center, that’s what gives bad breath)
• 40 grams finely chopped shallots
• 100 grams finely chopped parsley

Directions:

Leave your butter at room temperature until soft (that’s an easy thing to do here in South Florida). You can use an electric chopper to get the garlic, shallots and parsley chopped finely. Then, in a salad bowl, mix all your ingredients well until you obtain a homogeneous paste. I’d advise you to transfer it to a zip lock bag and flatten it out and keep it in the freezer, this way you can break off pieces as needed. It should keep for a few months. Then you will be able to use it little by little, not only to cook “escargots,” but for a lot of other preparations such as sautéed potatoes, garlic mushrooms, tomatoes, etc. You are the chef!