Learn how to make vegan brown butter with these tips! Brown butter is a wonderful addition to recipes both sweet and savory. If you follow a plant-based diet, you can still replicate the flavor and the process of browning butter.
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💭 What is brown butter?
Browning butter is a French technique, also known as buerre noisette, used to cook and color dairy butter. Browning and adding butter to food is supposed to enrich the flavor to add rich smokiness and depth of flavor to both savory and sweet foods.
👩🏽🍳 How to make any vegan butter brown
For any vegan butter to brown, you need to imitate the Maillard reaction (the reaction between reducing sugars and proteins by the impact of heat). To imitate the Maillard reaction your plant-based butter needs to have both proteins and sugars, such as vegan butter that is based on nut milk.
Some plant-based butter is however oil-based. To help it recreate a Maillard reaction, you need to add protein and sugars to replicate it. A great way to do so is by adding nuts to the composition!
Whisk in some creamy (unsweetened) nut butter, like peanut, pecan or cashew, into your oil-based nut butter. If you have a nut allergy use a seed butter such as tahini. In addition to adding protein and sugar, the nuts will give it a slightly nutty taste and help emulsify the oils with the water.
🧈 Which vegan butter brands brown on their own?
- Miyoko‘s European Style Cultured Vegan Butter
- Kite Hill - European Style Butter
- Milkadamia - Buttery Spread
- Flora Plant-Based
🍳 How to use brown butter
Simply replace the butter element of your recipe with cooled brown butter. For example, most cookie recipes start with creaming butter and sugar together. In this case, simply cream sugar with the browned butter instead.
We would not recommend using it in a recipe that requires cold and solid butter, i.e pastry or pie crust.
📋 Vegan recipes using brown butter
- Brown Butter Snickerdoodles
- Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Brown Butter Maple Cookie Latte
- Peach Cobbler
- Brown Butter Pasta
- Sage Sauce
- Brown Butter Gnocchi
📖 Recipe
Vegan Brown Butter
Equipment
- metal bottomed pan to brown the butter
Ingredients
- 1 stick vegan butter (ca. 110g)
- 1 teaspoon unsweetened nut or seed butter (use only if the vegan butter is oil-based and without protein)
Instructions
- If your recipe requires more than a stick of butter, double or triple this recipe. Add butter and nut or seed butter to a bowl. Whisk together with a mixer, whisk, or fork.
- Add butter to a metal-bottomed pan (not a coated or non-stick pan). Turn the heat to medium and let the butter slowly melt while stirring with a whisk. Once melted stop stirring. It will start to crackle and pop eventually.
- Cook for a couple of minutes until the butter has turned into a rich browned, darkened color. Stir every once in a while and be sure not to burn it though! Transfer to a small bowl and let cool before using.
This brown butter gives such an amazing flavor to cookies!
How very clever, to add a little nut butter. I need to give this a try!
It's good to know how to make brown butter out of vegan butter. I haven't made anything with brown butter since I was diagnosed with alpha-gal and had to give up mammalian food products, but those brown butter snickerdoodles sound like something I need to make for this holiday season!
this is so helpful! baking will be so much better with the vegan brown butter recipe. ty!