How To Make An Anchovy & Caper Butter

Hi, my name is Rob Cotton. Welcome to Leith's School of Food and Wine. We're a leading cookery school based in Central London in Chiswick.

Not only do we run a yearlong diploma course for professional students and chefs, we also run a range of one day, one week and evening class courses to give inspiration to further the recipes and skills at home. I'm going to show you how to make an anchovy and caper butter. For this, you need caper berries which are large and are in a brine.

If the brine is quite salty, do remember to rinse them. They're quite pungent, a pungent berry. Also, we're going to use anchovy fillets which are often in brine as well, so again, if quite salty, do rinse these off.

You will just need for 55 grams of softened butter, 2 anchovy fillets and about a teaspoon of capers. The butter needs to be taken out well and advanced about half an hour to forty five minutes before you're going to use it out of the fridge after it has softened up to make it more pliable and easy to use. Also in here, is a little bit of garlic for that extra flavour.

This has been really finely crushed down into the puree. You could, if you didn't have any fresh garlic, use garlic puree from a tube. However, I advise against it because it doesn't have as much flavour as freshly crushed garlic does.

Okay, to chop these up, you want it really nice and fine, you don't want to bite into a large piece of the capers or the anchovies either. Use a cross-chopping action and every now and then, bring the mixture back together, otherwise you are chasing it all over the board and doesn't make it the most efficient use of your time. In go the capers.

The same process for the anchovy fillets, combine that together with the garlic, a little pinch of salt, if the anchovy and caper's already a little quite salty, so not too much salt in there, and a good crack of black pepper as well. Combine this together in the bowl into this really well-mixed mixture. This butter will be quite strong in flavour so it's important not to use too much of it when you come to add it to dishes.

To make it a lot easier to handle and use, you can wrap this in a little bit of cling film, form it into a log shape, put that into the fridge and it takes about half an hour to forty five minutes to set. It's then really easy to cut up. This butter works well with roast lamb or indeed lamb cutlets if you barbecue those.

This is how you make anchovy and caper butter. .