Enriching Sauces with Butter

Finishing sauces with butter has become one of the most important and widely used techniques in contemporary sauce making. The technique consists of swirling chunks of cold butter into a hot flavor base, usually just before serving. Essentially the technique is the same as that used for making beurre blanc or other emulsified butter sauces, except that the technique is most often used today for last-minute made-to-order sauces.

Certain precautions should always be followed when using butter as a thickener. If too large or too small a proportion of butter is used for a given amount of liquid, the sauce will break. The proportion of butter used to thicken a given amount of liquid can vary from about 20 percent butter to almost ten times as much butter as flavor base (for example, Beurre Blanc). If too small a proportion of butter is used, it tends to separate and float to the surface of the sauce unless the sauce is already an emulsion based on cream or egg yolks, or contains flour or modernist emulsifiers or stabilizers. Large proportions of butter are used to finish intensely flavored liquids—beurre blanc is again an example—but if too much butter is used, the taste of the flavor base is lost and the sauce takes on a thick, waxy appearance and may break.