The Unique Compound Butter Gordon Ramsay Adds For Bold Flavor In Sweet Potatoes

Leave it to Gordon Ramsay to show us how to take a basic recipe and flavor it in a way we hadn't yet considered. On an episode of "MasterChef," Ramsay is seen blending sweet potatoes with compound butter that has been made with coffee. His recipe got us thinking about how we can modify some of our own culinary attempts to mimic his inventive moves.

While you can dump coffee extract directly into recipes to flavor dishes, you can also make your own compound butter to have on hand to use in baking and cooking projects. Choose fresh, unsalted butter for your compound-making endeavors and combine it with espresso powder and a touch of powdered sugar for added sweetness and silky texture. The earthy depth of the espresso plays well with smooth, grassy notes of farm-fresh butter, and your resulting creation will build new layers of flavor in your favorite go-to recipes. Once you have the coffee-flavored butter stocked in your home, you can consider replacing brown butter used in a sweet potato with savory rosemary streusel recipe with the coffee-flavored butter, for example.

Coffee butter isn't just meant for vegetable recipes, either. Not only can coffee butter add a burst of rich flavor to whipped sweet potatoes as demonstrated by Ramsay, but coffee compound butter can also add depth to dishes like a grilled tomahawk rib-eye steak or salmon finished in the oven. When melted, coffee butter can be drizzled on top of plates of French toast and stacks of pancakes before being crowned with garnishes of chocolate flakes, dollops of homemade honey whipped cream, and mixtures of cinnamon and sugar.

Add coffee butter to the next rich bread pudding you make from scratch or use the coffee-flavored ingredient to spruce up a batch of gingerbread cookies. Experiment with different kinds of coffee and add spices like cinnamon or freshly ground pumpkin pie spice to flavor your butter creations. Your biggest concern will be making more of this compound butter than what you think you'll need, as this is the kind of ingredient that will disappear quickly from your kitchen — so, too, will any of the dishes you make using it. Your coffee butter will last a week in the fridge if you don't use it all before then.