Butter Up

Climb the heights of cooking with butter.

In the movie "Julie and Julia", Julie Powell says that there can never be too much butter in cooking recipes from American chef, Julia Child. And when she goes to the gallery on Child's achievements in the culinary circle, she leaves a huge slab of butter behind as a tribute to Child's finesse as a master of French cuisine made easy to follow by American women.

Now I agree with Powell's observation in her kitchen. You see, butter makes a great base to saute fresh green asparagus with a liberal sprinkling of orange juice; as it is to stir fry spinach in a generous doublet of extremely heavy cream. And when it's mixed with chicken stock, the pea, koo chye and shallot salsa is transformed into an absolutely mouth-watering saucy sauce to dress some Norwegian salmon, quickly panned seared in lots and lots of creamy butter.

Now the last proves a second point about cooking with butter: the pan frying has to be done rapidly. Just a minute to saute the freshly chopped garlic and fiery red chilli, before you add in the ocean-fresh prawns to cook in another two to three minutes. Then the melted butter works its magic in seasoning the dish.

However, if you have to cook the chicken for about twenty minutes in butter, you run the risk of burning the oily golden yellow liquid if you keep the pan seated on high heat. And you know that that has happened because the yellow turns a murky brown, with a bitter after taste.

But there is an Italian recipe that does call for cooking prettily pink chicken breast in melted butter for twenty minutes. Then the only way to divert the butter from heading for a burn is to drastically lower the enthusiasm of the flames the moment all that diary product has just melted. And the chicken breast has to be quartered so that the heat from the stove can sear its insides more rapidly.

If that proves difficult to muster, then the trick is to mix the melted butter with extra virgin olive oil. This oil and butter mixture can then withstand high heat from a larger flame, even when a longer cooking time is called for.

So once you have mastered the way the flames interact with melted butter for a recipe that needs a longer cooking time, then by all means use as much of this luscious ingredient as you like. For truly, you can never use enough butter.