The Garlic Butter Mistake That's Robbing You Of So Much Flavor

It's a snap to make great garlic butter at home, even though you can buy all sorts of fancy varieties at the store. It means you have total control over the flavor, so you can change ingredients and ratios around to suit your taste. But when you make it yourself, you also need to be aware of a key mistake many home cooks make when whipping up a delicious batch of garlic butter. It all comes down to how you mince your garlic.

You see, mincing garlic is a fine art. Once you've mastered it, you unlock a whole new level of flavor in everything from sauces to marinades, and you can also easily enhance dressings and vinaigrette with minced garlic. Tragically, though, most people don't mince their garlic fine enough — and this is essential for garlic butter. 

When your garlic pieces are too big, they won't be dispersed evenly throughout your butter mixture. This leaves you with a garlic butter with some spots that have really intense garlic flavor, and other spots that barely contain a trace of the stuff. It's not bad, per se. It could just be a whole lot better. As a bonus, mincing the cloves finely will make your butter taste extra-garlicky, too, as breaking the garlic down releases more of its pungent sulfur compounds.

Most people think of garlic presses when they need to mince their garlic into a paste. If you don't use the allium regularly, then you may not have this tool — but fortunately, you can still mince garlic extra-fine without a garlic press. All you need is a fork. First, peel your garlic and set the cloves down on a cutting board. Then, take a fork and press the tines into the garlic, crushing it. You can mash the cloves as fine as you need to this way. Alternatively, you could use a sharp knife to finely mince garlic, which gives you lots of control, or a microplane for a very fine paste.

Once you have your garlic all minced up, make sure the butter you're mixing it into is softened. Scrape all your minced garlic and as much of the juice as you can into your butter and give it a good stir, making sure all that garlicky goodness is spread evenly throughout. This also gives it a lighter and more spreadable texture. 

You can let your garlic butter sit in the fridge for a few hours to develop the flavors further, but eating it as-is right after you're done mixing in the garlic mince is a tasty treat, too. Your newly made butter will keep in the fridge wrapped in plastic wrap for up to five days – but trust me when I say it'll be gone long before that.