Miso & Mushroom Butter Sandwiches
If you like butter and salt, buckle up!
By now surely you are familiar with the TikTok butter man1 and his exquisite compound butter quenelles.
I have no way to prove this2, but I was dabbling with flavored butter all the way back in December. But who am I!?? Compound butters have been kicking around in food writing all the way back to Escoffier.
You see this a lot on TikTok and on social in general: people make a thing that’s not new but they present it in a new way on a newish platform and then it’s new (again). I have no issues with this. Most cooks are in a constant state of making and remaking and reimagining recipes they’ve eaten, seen, read, or heard about. Every change to an old recipe, even when these tweaks are tiny or iterative, link what we’re doing now with what cooks did before, and so on and so forth until you could convince yourself that you’re connected somehow to every cook who ever came before you. Love that.
Anyway, back to my Buttery December Adventures. I was working on a few snack recipes for the holiday season, and set out to make little finger sandwiches with a very concentrated mushroom butter. I started by roasting ordinary creminis at fairly high heat until they resembled raisins of the fungus world.
This worked: the mushrooms had given up their liquid and tasted intensely shroomy. Rather than using 100% butter, I added cream cheese to steer the mixture out of savory buttercream territory, but it still tasted flat. Miso helped, but it was the grated fresh ginger that brought it all together, and gave it the heat it needed to stand up to the slightly sweet sandwich bread.
While I’ve never had this exact recipe before, it’s based on things we already know and love, including but not limited to:
tender scrumptious buttery sandwiches
the perfect and everlasting pairing of miso and mushrooms
snacks and snacking
If you didn’t want to eat the mushroom butter à la sandwich, you could absolutely throw it into a bowl of hot cooked noodles or use it to baste a steak, salmon fillet, or even a skillet of crispy mushrooms right before they come off the heat. Or go watch the fun stuff Mr. Butter does with compound butters and come up with a brand new idea, all your own(ish).
The recipe for Miso & Mushroom Butter Sandwiches is below for paid subscribers (thank you!), both as a PDF and as plain text.