Barbara Lynch's Rich Soup That's Basically Velvety, Sippable Butter
If you've ever dreamed about a dish where you can basically drink your butter, Barbara Lynch has found a way to make it. The James Beard Award-winning chef dubs the dish "butter soup," and unsurprisingly, butter is the star of the show. But not just any type will do. According to Bon Appétit, the version Lynch uses contains a whopping 87% butterfat that comes from her own cows at a farm in Orwell, Vermont. And to make the central ingredient impossible to miss, she uses an entire pound of unsalted butter for four servings of soup — that's a quarter pound of the stuff per bowl.
Of course, there are a few other ingredients involved in this dish, so you're not literally eating straight butter. Swimming in the yellow savory broth are mussels, littleneck clams, shrimp (one per serving), and optional black caviar. Lynch also includes lemon juice, an egg yolk, honey, warm water, salt, and optional chopped chives. So if you're a fan of seafood dipped in butter sauce — and who isn't? — this dish has the same flavors at its core, with the ratio of seafood to butter reversed.
Seafood's butter bath
All the way back in 2010, Lynch featured butter soup on the menu at Menton, one of her many Boston food and drink establishments. The fine dining restaurant only has options for customers to choose from on chef's tasting menus, and at the time, a server would pour melted butter in your bowl after it arrived at your table. As Lynch proclaimed to Zester Daily, via Rhode Island Monthly, she believed the soup was the best dish at Menton. "You'll want to take a bath in it ... When I made it for the James Beard Awards, everybody said, 'Oh, you must be crazy.' It was a total hit. [Award-winning N.Y. restaurateur] Danny Meyer's wife, took three gallons of it home," she said.
At Lynch's restaurant in 2010, Lynch made the dish with caviar from Iran. But if you want to whip up this divine liquid gold at home, any old caviar will do. The first step, of course, is to melt all that butter over low heat with a little water. Then, Lynch cooks the seafood, adds lemon juice and salt to the butter, and makes another unique aspect of the recipe: The foamy honey emulsion. It sounds complicated, but all you really have to do is whisk an egg yolk with honey and warm water. Once the seafood is swimming in butter, you can top it with the emulsion, caviar, and a little chive.