Carotene Butter

This carotene butter tastes more like a carrot than a carrot, and more like butter than butter. That's because skimming off the carrot's cellulose (the insoluble polysaccharides that make up the cell walls of plants), strips away any watery, fibrous flavor normally found in a raw carrot, leaving only the carrot's purest essence: sweet, slightly nutty, and, of course, bright orange. Likewise, skimming whey off melted butter yields a pure butterfat flavor creamy, smooth, and rich. 

Carotene butter is a simple and versatile preparation. Serve it cold as a condiment, melt it into soups, or use it to sauté oyster mushrooms or scallops to impart color. The technique actually works with any pigment-rich plant-food, such as tomatoes or micro-greens, so use your imagination to try other variations, and be sure to share your results with us!

This recipe works in part because carotene, the pigment found in carrots that turns them bright orange, is fat-soluble. So when you cook clarified butter and fresh carrot juice together, all that orange pigment readily dissolves, yielding a colorful liquid that, when cooled, becomes a beautiful bright-orange butter. Our development chef Nick Gavin first made carotene butter with a centrifuge, as part of a dinner for Modernist Cuisine. But for ChefSteps, he wanted to create an easy stovetop version. 

"In this recipe, you will notice that the butter is clarified, blended with the carrot juice, and then re-clarified," Nick explains. "That's because milk proteins normally found in butter will act as emulsifiers, making the separation of water, cellulose, and milk solids difficult when you add the carrot juice in Step 5. So the key is to start with clarified butter, and go from there." With Nick's technique, you can make colorful butters easily at home, without any special equipment.