Easy Garlic Herb Butter Recipe

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Cooking With Anadi

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Compound butter sounds like something reserved for fancy restaurants, as you’ve probably seen those special butters served alongside your proteins when you’ve had a special night out. However, compound butter is nothing more than softened butter blended with garlic and fresh herbs, and it really transforms everything it touches! As I mention in my NEW motivational guide to explore your potential in the kitchen, The Cook’s Mindset, getting inspired by your favorite restaurants can help with your creativity at home! This one tweak to your butter will give you a high quality restaurant experience right at home!

Garlic herb butter is the most versatile compound butter you can make. As we’ll soon see, it works on steak, warm crusty bread, roasted vegetables, grilled fish, and even tossed through pasta. This post covers the base recipe plus several variations so you can adapt it to whatever herbs you have on hand.

Why Room Temperature Butter Is Everything

The single thing that makes or breaks compound butter is starting with truly room-temperature butter. You need to ensure that it’s soft enough that a finger presses in easily. When the butter is properly softened, the minced garlic and chopped herbs blend in smoothly and distribute evenly throughout.

Use cold butter and you will end up fighting it: the herbs clump together in pockets, the garlic does not incorporate, and the finished texture is lumpy rather than silky. Pull your butter out at least an hour before you start.

Tools Needed for Garlic Herb Butter

• Mixing bowl
• Spatula
• Salt crock
• Pepper mill
• Plastic wrap
• Ramekin
• Cutting board
• Chef’s knife

Ingredients for Garlic Herb Butter

Let’s break down what goes into our delicious compound butter recipe! Remember, to save the recipe for later and to scale the ingredients based on how much butter you’re working with, you can refer to the FULL PRINTABLE recipe card below.

• Butter: Softened butter at room temperature. This will help mixing the ingredients better.
• Chives: Fresh chives finely chopped.
• Garlic: Freshly minced garlic cloves. Garlic cloves will provide a much more subtle flavor compared to the intensity of garlic powder, so I recommend you use garlic cloves instead of the dried spice.
• Lime juice: You can use freshly squeezed lime juice or from a bottle.
• Salt and pepper: Key seasoning that you always add to taste!

How to Make Compound Butter

Add all of the ingredients except salt to a large bowl. Start mixing the ingredients together using a spatula.

Grab a whisk and mix well. Shake off any butter stuck between the spokes of the whisk as needed, keep mixing until the ingredients are well combined. Taste and season for salt as needed.

Transfer the butter onto a sheet of plastic wrap, shape it into a rough log, and roll it up tightly, twisting the ends to seal. Use the ends to roll the log back and forth over your countertop to smooth out the sides of the log and then pat the ends of the log flat.

Refrigerate or freeze if not using right away.

Chives Are the Only Herb in Here - No Basil, No Parsley, No Thyme

Despite the name, this compound butter contains exactly one herb. It is 150 g of room-temperature salted butter, 1/2 cup of finely chopped fresh chives, 10 to 12 minced garlic cloves, 1 teaspoon of lime juice, and salt and pepper to taste. There is no parsley in it, no thyme, no rosemary and no fresh basil. Chives were a deliberate choice: they are mild and gently oniony, so they sit behind the garlic instead of competing with it, and they keep their green flecks rather than browning the way soft herbs can. If you do want fresh basil in yours, chop it very finely and swap it for about a third of the chives rather than all of them, because basil is assertive enough to take the butter somewhere else entirely.

The acid here is lime juice, which is slightly more floral than the obvious choice. Lemon juice is the substitution listed on the recipe card and goes in at the same 1 teaspoon. Either way it is a small amount, and its job is to lift the butter rather than to make it taste citrusy. For the salt, I use salted butter and then season to taste on top; if you start with unsalted butter, add flaky sea salt gradually and taste as you go, because compound butter tastes much saltier warm than it does cold.

Raw Garlic, Not a Garlic Roast

Ten to twelve cloves sounds like a lot, and it is meant to. The garlic goes in raw and minced, which gives the butter a real bite that stands up to a hot steak. That is a different thing from a garlic roast: roasting a whole head until the cloves are soft and sweet, then mashing that into butter, gives you something mellow and almost caramelized in flavor. Both are good, they are simply not the same butter, and if you want the roasted version you should treat this as a separate recipe rather than a swap. Whichever you make, keep the log in the fridge and use it within a week, or freeze it - raw garlic in fat should never sit out at room temperature.

Total Time Is 10 Minutes, and You Do Not Need a Food Processor

The total time on this dish is 10 minutes, all of it prep, because nothing is cooked. Everything except the salt goes into a large bowl and gets worked together with a spatula, then a whisk until the butter is pale and airy. A food processor will get you there faster, but it shreds the chives into a paste and colors the whole batch a uniform pale green, so you lose the flecks that make a slice look like something. The blade also warms the butter, which is the opposite of what you want. A bowl, a spatula and a whisk is genuinely the better tool here.

Once it is mixed, tip it onto a large sheet of plastic wrap, pat it roughly into a log, roll the wrap around it and twist both ends like a sweet wrapper. Roll it on the counter to tighten and push out trapped air, then refrigerate until firm.

Where to Use a Slice of Compound Butter