How To Make Anchovy Butter

Hi, my name is Rob Cotton. Welcome to Leith's School of Food and Wine, we are a leading cookery school based in Central London in Chiswick. Not only do we run a year long diploma course for professional students and chefs, we also run a range of one day, one week and evening class courses to give inspiration for further recipes at home.

I'm going to show you how to make an anchovy butter. For this, you will need 55 grams of softened butter, it's really important to use soft butter to make these flavored butters as it is quite difficult to work with firm butter from the fridge. So leave it out for about half an hour to 45 minutes before you use it to get it really nice and soft and easy to work with.

With the 55 grams of butter, I'm going to use a clove of garlic which is going to be crushed down and a couple of anchovy fillets. If the anchovy fillets have been in a brine that is particularly salty, do give them a good rinse before you use them. It is quite simple to cut up the anchovy fillets, once they have dried off, chop them into small pieces and then chop through again.

This was they will be evenly distributed through the butter, and you wont bite into any large pieces which can be a little bit salty. So when finely chopped, add into the butter. For the garlic, it needs to be really finely crushed.

You could use a garlic crusher for this but you do lose a little bit of the garlic and they are a bit difficult to wash up if you leave them for any amount of time. So the easiest way to do this is to crush with the side of your knife down on the garlic. This splits it open and makes it much easier to peel.

Also cut off the root end where there is a little hard piece which doesn't chop down very easily. Once the papery outside has been removed, cut the garlic into small pieces ready for crushing. When into suitably sized small pieces, get a little pinch of salt onto the garlic, this helps as an abrasive.

Use a paddling action, the knife needs to be flat to the board and crush a little bit of garlic at a time. You can see all of the juices coming out which give you a great flavor and makes the garlic a bit more subtle. You don't want to be biting into large pieces of garlic.

Just to make sure you can chop through it one more time, and puree again. A little bit of seasoning into this, a tiny pinch of salt as the anchovies are already quite salty and a good crack of black pepper. Combine this together until the ingredients are evenly distributed in the butter.

Because this mixture is quite soft, it is difficult to work with straight away so I would highly recommend putting it into the fridge in some cling film, in the shape of a log, it is then much easier to cut in half an hour / 45 minutes into little pieces ready to use. It would work particularly well with roast lamb. After you have roasted it, just place the butter on top and it will melt over.

That is how you make anchovy butter. .