5 Genius Ways To Upgrade Your Cooking With Butter

The French certainly know a few things.

Science may not have made up its mind about whether butter is good or bad for your health yet, but humanity decided a looong time ago that it is DELICIOUS.

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Enjoy in moderation! (After all, even QUINOA in excess must not be great for you).

And in my opinion, that's good enough. So here are a few ways to use butter that you may never have considered before:

1. In sauces that call for olive oil, try substituting part of the oil for butter.

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You know when you start a risotto, how you sauté the onions in olive oil with butter? Well, the partnership is too good to stop there. Take any recipe with a simple olive oil-based sauce, like aglio e olio, or a recipe that starts with sautéing in oil, and replace part of the oil with butter. Take it on a case-by-case basis, but a good starting point is with three parts olive oil to two parts butter.

2. If you're looking to make your homemade tomato sauce richer and more delicious, try making it with butter.

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There's a good reason the Italian chef Marcella Hazan's tomato sauce recipe is hailed as the best (and easiest) in the whole world. It's just tomato, onion, salt and butter — LOTS of butter. See it here. It's definitely worth a try.

3. Butter can accentuate many dishes that call for soy sauce. Just replace the oil it calls for with butter. You won't regret it.

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As I mentioned in this post about soy sauce, this is a wonderful combination. In recipes like beef and broccoli, try using butter instead of neutral cooking oil. You'll never want to make it any other way.

4. Butter can make any creamy soup recipe more filling and tasty.

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One of the secrets of this carrot and curry soup, one of my favorites, is the butter. You can adapt it to any other cream of vegetable soup by adding two tablespoons of butter for every cup of vegetables. If you think it's too much butter, go with half olive oil, half butter. (If you must.)

5. And as a finishing touch, add butter to that perfectly cooked steak!

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Have you grilled a beautiful steak like this? Remove it from the pan and, while it rests, rub a spoonful of cold butter over it. It's the difference between a good steak and a steak that's FREAKIN' GREAT. Or, even better, baste the steak with melted butter while it finishes cooking. Get a full tutorial here.