... not traditional Skippy-type peanut butter, but butter infused with peanut flavor.
peanut 'butter,' bitter chocolate biscuit, late harvest wine jelly
PlayingWithFire&Water recently posted a tutorial on making cultured butter. I'm not going to go into that process (but feel free to check it out here- pdf recipe with pictures at the bottom of the post). One of the ideas thrown out was infusing flavors into butter by first infusing them into the cream. Chef K took the cream right below the pasteurization temperature and steeped chopped roasted peanuts into it at 70ºC. The cream was cooled and allowed to sit with the peanuts for 2 days refrigerated. After straining, the buttermilk was added and the butter process began.
After creaming and washing, we were left with a beautiful peanut scented butter which acted as a sort of bread service/amuse bouche... why not. Going through the process did answer the reverberating question of why don't restaurants make their own butter. Well, at least not this hotel kitchen.
It's great when we can all draw inspiration from each other in different parts of the country via the internet. We were up in the air as to what type of avocado element to add to a foie gras panna cotta dish. The revolving flavors were foie gras, avocado, banana, truffle. After seeing Chris Windus' lobster dish here, we used the same method but added the other elements.
truffled avocado and carmelized banana block