That time I ordered the butter flight. You should too
There was a kid in my middle-school class who used to eat straight butter. I remember him pulling gold foil-wrapped squares out of his lunch pail, like the ones you get with a basket of bread in a chain restaurant. He’d eat them as a snack. The first time I tried Normandy butter — the really good stuff — I thought of that kid and his afternoon butter snack. Maybe he was on to something.
The following are dishes brought to life by copious amounts of good, creamy, salty butter.
Butter flight with the chicken and waffles at the Court Cafe
Sometimes, chef Kenneth Carr eats butter with a spoon. The executive chef and manager of the Court Cafe in Westchester finds it hard to resist the restaurant’s five flavored butters: peach cobbler, strawberry swirl, brown sugar, crunch berry and blue pebble.
“Sometimes I catch myself just eating the butter and I have to remind myself, ‘Hey, this is butter,’ you know,” he said.
Opened by the “Foodminati” (Jermelle Henderson of Taco Mell, Keith Garett of All Flavor No Grease and Calvin Johnson of Bleu Kitchen) in 2019, the restaurant has garnered a loyal following (including 122,000 social followers) with brunch dishes like red velvet waffles, cereal French toast and, of course, the flavored butters.
You can order the butters on waffles, pancakes, grits (Carr’s favorite) or as a flight of all five to spread as you please. On a recent visit, I ordered the chicken and waffles and the full butter flight.
The peach cobbler butter transforms your breakfast into dessert, studded with sweet, soft stewed peaches that taste like they’ve been cooked down with cinnamon and nutmeg. It’s like adding a scoop of cobbler filling to your waffle and topping it with melted butter. After trying it on its own, I added enough to swamp the waffle squares and decided that was the right amount.
“Our peach cobbler butter is the main one that everyone loves,” Carr said. “Cobbler is a staple especially in the African American community. That’s one that we look forward to with our aunties and grandmothers making peach cobbler for Sunday dinners or holidays.”
The principles remain similar in chef Paul Chung’s treatment of striped bass from Baja. Plus, going for hot pot in Tustin.
The strawberry butter, made with a fresh strawberry puree and softened butter, is just as compelling. Imagine adding a scoop of strawberry ice cream to your waffle or pancakes. You could eat it with a spoon.
I dunked my fried chicken wings in some of the melted brown sugar butter, eliminating the need for syrup.
The crunch berry butter involves Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berry cereal and the blue pebble incorporates Fruity Pebbles. They’ll generate a sugar rush and turn whatever you’re eating pink or blue, depending on which you choose.
“The biggest thing with the Court Cafe is we wanted to make sure it was flavorful Southern comfort food, a lot of Creole cuisine, but also just fun,” Carr said.
Chicken and waffles is a dish that needs no introduction, explanation or adornment beyond maybe a splash of syrup and hot sauce. And Carr’s chicken, brined for 24 hours and flavored with his special mix of Cajun seasonings, is excellent on its own. As are his waffles, infused with brown sugar, cinnamon and vanilla. But when there’s a butter flight on the table, everything becomes a vessel for butter, and brunch is infinitely more fun.
Cornbread at Dunsmoor
The seats at the counter at Dunsmoor in Glassell Park, opposite the wood-burning oven, are the best seats in the house. It’s like you’re having dinner in front of a crackling fire, and you have a direct line of sight to the countless rounds of cornbread that emerge from the oven.
If you tried chef Brian Dunsmoor’s cornbread when he was at Hatchet Hall in Culver City, there may be a moment of déjà vu, but three bites into the Dunsmoor cornbread, I decided this version was markedly different, and even better.
“It’s an adaptation of a recipe from an old Edna Lewis cookbook, who is one of my culinary heroes,” Dunsmoor said. “Now I’m definitely more focused on historical regional-inspired cuisines, hence why we use all the old techniques.”
At Dunsmoor, there are no electric machines in the kitchen beyond refrigeration. The chef tweaked his original recipe into something he could bake in a wood-burning oven with varying levels of heat. There is no thermometer, and the cooks must rely on intuition and practice to get it just right, moving the cornbread from one pocket of the oven to another to achieve the right cooking temperature. The cornbread shrunk in size from its original version and is now served in a 5-inch skillet to accommodate the high heat in the oven, which Dunsmoor estimates never falls below 500 degrees.
And while the Hatchet Hall cornbread incorporates shishito peppers, the chef now uses Hatch chiles, Pueblo chiles or Anaheim chiles at Dunsmoor, depending on the season. They are a nod to his family of ranchers in Colorado. Though Dunsmoor grew up eating black-eyed peas and cornbread in Georgia, his family is originally from Fowler, Colo., a ranch town where, he claims, “There are more cows than people.” It’s about 40 minutes from Pueblo, an area where Pueblo chiles are grown.
“The thing that makes this cornbread really special is that the idea came from being inspired by someone like Edna Lewis and tying my family history into it,” he said. “When my parents moved to the South, my mom started making Southern food, but she couldn’t get away from the green chiles. It’s a little mashup of my two heroes, Edna Lewis and my mom.”
It’s also special because of all the butter. In addition to the Anson Mills cornmeal that gives the cornbread a superb, soft, grainy texture and a pronounced corn flavor, the 2-year Hook’s cheddar and the chiles, Dunsmoor uses copious amounts of Acadinha farmstead butter from Petaluma.
This week’s recommendations include Bar Chelou and Le Chateau de Tien Tao, my two new favorite restaurants in Pasadena.
From my seat at the counter on a recent evening, I watched as one cook removed the cornbread from the oven and another dressed it for service. Each round received a heaping spoonful of softened butter, a ladleful of Bill’s Bees honey and three pinches of sea salt.
By the time it was served, the butter had gone louche. It spilled over the sides with the honey, creating a pool of honey butter on both the top and bottom of the cornbread. The sheer amount felt excessive, alarming even, because I had just witnessed the application. But when I dug my spoon into the middle and scooped up a bite, the saturation of butter, honey and salt was aggressively decadent and felt just right.
“Anything worth putting on a plate, you should be putting enough of it on there,” Dunsmoor said. “We’re not measuring anything, but there is a standard of how much. More is more in this situation.”
Where to eat now
Dunsmoor, 3501 Eagle Rock Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 686-6027, dunsmoor.la
The Court Cafe, 5496 W. Centinela Ave., Los Angeles, (310) 431-4969, thecourtcafe.net
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