Your Next Batch of Pancakes Deserves This Perfect Maple Butter
When it comes to pancakes, I’m a bit of an obnoxious purist. While I do appreciate the occasional chocolate cheese pancake (Weencake, if you will), my favorite pancake flavor is buttermilk and my favorite toppings are butter and maple syrup.
The combination of maple and (salted) butter is incredibly popular because it is incredibly delicious. The rich, salty butter and dark, sweet maple bring out all the flavor notes, or at least all the flavors you want on a pancake (which itself provides some acid through the buttermilk). It’s hard to improve on anything, but Neil Kleinberg of the Clinton Street Baking Company does just that with his maple butter.
Maple butter is exactly what it sounds like: maple butter and butter whipped together to make a single sauce. This benefits the pancake in several ways: instead of spreading a chunk of hard butter over a tender pancake, which can cause it to burst, and then drizzling syrup on, you can spread both ingredients evenly in one go without worrying about the pancake’s structural integrity. It may seem like a silly detail, but it makes the process of eating pancakes more consistent and delicious.
According to MarthaStewart.com , Kleinberg recommends a cup of grade B maple syrup ( now officially called “grade A: dark color and strong flavor”) for every cup (two sticks) of unsalted butter. This obviously can be scaled up or down to suit your family’s pancake needs. The only change I would recommend is to use salted butter rather than unsalted butter, because, to quote our own A. A. Newton , “salt not only makes food tasty; it gives flavor to the food, period.”
Making maple oil is easy. Heat the syrup in a saucepan over medium heat and add the chunks of cold butter one at a time, beating after each addition, until you have a light brown caramel-like sauce. Serve warm (with warm pancakes) and store leftovers in a covered container in the refrigerator where they can be stored, ready to be reheated when pancakes are desired, for up to two months.