Compound butter, or Beurre Maitre d'Hotel, sounds kind of fancy, but it's not. It's flavored butter, and Chef Curtiss Hemm says it's incredibly easy to make and lasts for months in the fridge. You’re probably most familiar with the concept thanks to those pats of butter you might find enticingly melting over a steak at a restaurant.

Chef Curtiss owns the Carriage House Cooking School in Peru, NY, and is the executive chef  at The View Restaurant at the Mirror Lake Inn Resort and Spa in Lake Placid.  He told Todd Moe that his idea of "home butter" is a base recipe that starts with 1 stick (8 tablespoons) of butter.

Todd Moe Chef Curtiss: flavored butter to upgrade your favorite recipe

Chef Curtiss' "house butter" with lemon juice and chopped parsley slathered on roast chicken breast. Photo provided

CURTSS HEMM: We take room temperature butter, so we soften it up. You don't do this in the microwave; you want to keep the emulsion because butter in the refrigerator, in its physical state - the butter that we spread on toast - is an emulsion. It's a mixture of milk, solids, butter, fat, and then the different proteins and things that are in there. So we want to keep that as an emulsion. That's the whole point of this.

So we soften it up to room temperature, something that we can easily paddle. You can do this by hand; you can do this by machine, it doesn't really matter.

Then we add our flavor agents. I usually add salt, freshly cracked black pepper, lemon juice, and then I like parsley, just as a generic butter. The picture that I shared with you of the chicken breast (above) is the parsley, but if you're into 100% utilization, you could add the lemon zest to that. It's going to add a lot more lemon flavor than say, just adding the lemon juice to that. I often do that, just so I don't waste it because I figure I've already paid for it, I'm going to use it, I'm just going to throw it away. So why not throw it in there?

Then you just put all those ingredients in a bowl and slowly because it is a fat and you're incorporating a liquid to a fat, the lemon juice to the fat, you want to go slowly, otherwise, you're going to be wearing the lemon juice.

Start cutting it in, and then eventually the fat will absorb the liquid and it'll become part of that emulsion and then you just paddle it and get as much air in there as you can. So you could do this in a machine like a KitchenAid. You could do it with a little sunbeam with the two little beater things that all the kids used to like the chocolate cake off. When you have mechanical advantage like that, you're going to get more volume of butter. The butter is going to be lighter because it's going to trap air in there. It's very hard for you to do that by hand in the same way. So if you're looking to really get this really light, fluffy whipped butter, use a machine. It lasts for months in the fridge, as is.

It's endless what you can do with it!

TODD MOE: And then slather it on steak or a roast or I'm thinking just a slice of fresh baked bread or baguette or something. Woof!

HEMM: Yeah, so now we go to its functionality. Let's just say it's a weeknight, you're busy, you just you fired up the grill, because it's nice night out. You're grilling a steak or a chicken breast or some mushrooms or even some carrots or something, but you don't want to go to the standard olive oil, salt pepper on this. You have a butter ready; you just take a pat of that butter and you throw it on the food when it comes off the grill. And you just toss that food in the butter and it melts and it's now a sauce, so the sauce adds a little bit of moisture and adds a little bit of acid and salt. It brings forward flavors, either complementary or contrasting and it adds visual appeal because it makes the food shiny and and whatnot.

It's a great all purpose sauce that you don't have to work out hardly at all.

MOE: What if I got really ambitious and wanted to make my own butter and take some heavy whipping cream and shake it in a jar, so you could make your own homemade butter and then add all these savory flavors?

HEMM: Absolutely! The thing about butter and a lot of people think that you just whip cream and it comes out to butter. You have to whip it; you have to break the proteins out. Then, you have to squeeze it. Then, you have to rinse it and then make it compact. So there's a little bit about are making but yeah, absolutely you could.

But again, I think you're gonna go back to the quality of your ingredients.

We make butter here at the house two different ways: we'll make butter the way you're talking about. I'll often just put it in a mason jar and shake it for a long time, or I'll put it on a paddle on a Kitchenaid and run that for a while if I can stand the noise.

The other way I do that is I whip cream almost until it breaks so it's super, super fluffy. I love to do this with fresh bread and then I'll either salt that quickly with like a maldon or a fleur de sel or I'll just put it in a ramekin and salt the top of the butter, but then you could add these flavor agents to that, so that would be my preferred choice for like the fresh bread.

Don't make the butter all the way where the protein breaks. Whip the cream as thick as you can before it separates. That's a fantastic butter flavor.

MOE: I can taste it already! Oh, that sounds so good!

HEMM: But if you want it to set in your fridge as an emulsion, you absolutely need to get to the butter stage where the proteins are separated from the fat. Either make true classic traditional butter or buy local butter. The butter that I'm familiar with is the Crownpoint Farm and Dairy.

MOE: This was really fun. I've got a stack of your recipes Curtiss! These are just fantastic. And I love this idea of making your own house butter. You know, adding the flavors that you like.

HEMM: Well that's the basic, you know? You learn a technique. You're making a compound butter. Now that you've learned a technique, you no longer need a recipe.

HEMM: Maybe you need to understand some basic ratios of how much salt and pepper to add to how much butter, but then you change your garnishes. And now you're cooking. I think that's a joy.