I like to make a special meal for my sweetie on Valentine’s day.  This year it included spinach salad with hard boiled eggs, bacon and mushrooms with a hot bacon dressing, poutine (A Canadian favorite) which is fries with cheese curds and gravy, asparagus with hollandaise (which broke, but that’s another blog post) and T-bone steaks with compound butter.

I wanted to make the compound butter, not because I thought the T-bones needed more flavor but because it looks impressive but couldn’t be easier.  Compound butters are just that — butter that has flavorful ingredients added to it.  It can be used on meats, fish and even vegetables.

I chose to add garlic and parsley to my butter along with a little salt and pepper.  But you can add just about any herb you’d like to your butter.

If you’re going to use a compound butter I would suggest seasoning your meat, fish or vegetables very simply so that it doesn’t fight the flavors of the butter.

I made extra of the butter so that we would have some leftover.  It would be delicious in scrambled eggs.

To make compound butter this is what you’ll need:

1 stick unsalted butter
herbs (fresh or dried) of your choice.

Let the butter come to room temperature so that your ingredients can be mixed into it easily.
For the butter I served I used 2 large cloves of garlic that I grated into the butter.  I prefer to grate the garlic since then you’re not biting into a huge piece of garlic and it gives a more pronounced garlic flavor.  I also added about 1/2 teaspoon or a liberal sprinkling of dried parsley.  Season lightly with salt and pepper.

This can be made a day ahead of time.  Once the steaks were cooked to our liking then we topped each one with the butter that melted all over the delicious meat.  HEAVENLY!

Compound butters can be made for sweet things too.  Like taking butter and cinnamon and a little sugar to top off french toast or pancakes.  Or using a compound butter to stuff inside a hollowed out apple then baked in the oven.

Compound butter is versatile and delicious.  You can easily add tons of flavor to almost anything!  So give it a try.

Have favorite compound butter combination?  I’d love to hear it — leave it in the comments below!