I don’t think it’s controversial to say but let me just drop this caveat: Vegan dupes for non-vegan foods are usually a bit disappointing for those of us who are craving the real thing. And you know what? That’s okay. Let vegan foods be delicious on their own, not as a pale imitation of something else.
I say this as an erstwhile vegan—hey, we all had those couple years in college, right?—and as an inveterate kitchen tinkerer (I once tried out a keto “bread” recipe that came out of the oven with the precise flavor and texture of a freshly unwrapped dish sponge). But a belly-warming bowl of pasta with sage minus the typical brown butter would be a real drag, wouldn’t it?
All of this is to say that I’ve been in my kitchen working on something that is decidedly not vegan brown butter. Instead, it’s a roasty-toasty, nutty, ever-so-slightly sweet infused oil that works nicely in place of brown butter. And if you’ll indulge me for a few more paragraphs, I promise to explain how I did it.
What makes brown butter taste so damn good?
Butter is delicious because it’s mostly fat; it’s not pure fat like, say, coconut oil. As with milk, butter is an emulsion of fat, water, protein, carbohydrates, and minerals—the latter three making up what is generally referred to as milk solids. Those solids include the proteins casein and lactalbumin, and lactose, a disaccharide that’s made up of two simple sugars (galactose and glucose).
Butter is a product of heavy cream, which itself is technically an oil-in-water emulsion composed of milk fat globules suspended in watery, sugar-and-protein-rich whey. To make butter, you bust up that emulsion by over-whipping, shaking, or churning the cream until it “breaks” and the previously separate fat globules begin to glue together—that’s butterfat. But some water, protein, and sugars remain mixed in with the butterfat, which is one of the reasons that butter that has not been clarified has a low smoke point. Before it ever gets hot enough to deep-fry a piece of chicken, you’ll burn the solids and fill your kitchen with smoke.
But if you slowly cook those milk solids in the melted butterfat over low heat, you’ll get something altogether spoon-licking called brown butter, or beurre noisette. As food science authority Harold McGee notes in On Food and Cooking, “Their flavor is deepened by heating the butter to about 250ºF/120ºC until its water boils off and the molecules in the white residue, milk sugar and protein, react with each other to form brown pigments and new aromas.”
Tomatoes love brown butter. And vegan brown butter substitutes too.
What happens when there are no milk solids?
Since vegan milk alternatives do not contain the same mix of fat, sugars, and proteins as dairy milk, one could not expect those alternatives to brown in the same way as dairy butter does. (Please do not try to brown almond milk on your stovetop, I beg of you.) And vegan butter alternatives are usually processed potions of palm oils, protein powders, and stabilizers that don’t brown well either.
