How To Make Herb 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.

I'm now telling you, we run a year-long diploma course for professionals and students and chefs. We also run a range of one day, one week, and even class courses to give inspiration to further recipes at home. I'm going to show you how to make herb butter.

This includes flat leaf parsley, thyme and chervil. But you could use any three other soft herbs. I'll probably try to avoid rosemary as it doesn't chop down very easily, it's a little bit woodier, a little bit hard.

For this, I'm going to use some softened butter, this is at room temperature and it takes about half an hour to 45 minutes to come to that consistency once it's out of the fridge. Using 55 grams to go with approximately 1 to 2 teaspoons of herbs in total. So if you want it slightly with more parsley over the other two, you could change the quantities as you so desire.

Also, add in a little bit of lemon juice to add some freshness to the butter. It's important when chopping the herbs that you just chop the leaves, not the stalks as the stalks can be a little bit gritty and as they don't cut down quite as easily as the leaves. You also want to make sure that you chop them fine enough because this goes in the butter, otherwise they can get a little bit coarse.

And especially with parsley, make sure that it's nice and clean so give it a good wash and dry it afterwards before you chop it up. With thyme, again it's especially important just to use the leaves. The stems can be really really woody and quite firm.

The easiest way to do that is to go against the grain that the leaves are growing in, so down the stalk to remove the leaves and then it will come off nice and easily that way. When you're cutting the thyme, if you do notice a couple of large stalks that aren't chopping down, just remove those to one side. A good alternative to regular thyme is lemon thyme which has a slightly more perfumed scent to it.

It's also important to chop all of your herbs separately as they take different amount of time to chop down. You don't want to bruise and cut them too much. I'm using a bit of chervil in here as well, a much softer herb, and the combination of parsley, thyme and chervil works very well together.

So I've got about 1 ½ teaspoons going into the softened butter, and then a pinch of salt, crack a black pepper for seasoning, and combine that together. Add a little dash of lemon juice. Once you've combined the ingredients together, you can wrap them up in clean foil, form it into a small log to set in the fridge and it takes about half an hour to 45 minutes to set.

It's much easier to cut it up after it's in a solid log and you can cut it to whatever size pieces you need. You can use this mixed herb butter to go through hot new potatoes or alternatively onto your steak just after you've cooked it. That's how you make herb butter.