Browned Butter Gives Apple Sauce An Awesome Depth Of Flavor

Let's talk browned butter. Brown butter is a staple of the restaurant world, but what exactly is it? Simply put, it's just butter that you cook until its milk solids caramelize. This gives browned butter its signature toasty, nutty, toffee-like flavor that makes it the perfect pairing for desserts, savory dishes, cocktails, and more. But while browned butter is often associated with fancy dishes, you can use it to upgrade even the simplest of things, like your favorite apple sauce.

For this delightful snack, you can either make your own apple sauce from scratch or just buy your favorite brand from the store. You also want to make your own browned butter, which is fortunately just as simple as taking a good, high-quality butter and carefully melting it on a burner until it starts to turn brown. There are easy ways for you to tell when brown butter is done cooking before it burns, and the whole process of browning your butter only takes around five to 10 minutes. If you're making your own apple sauce from scratch, you want to use about 2 tablespoons of butter for every 4 pounds of apples (which is about 6 large apples). If you're using store-bought apple sauce, you need only take a small teaspoonful of your melted brown butter and drizzle it into a cup full of your applesauce. Mix it well, and you have yourself a practically zero-effort treat that tastes like you spent way more time on it than you did.

Once you have your browned butter apple sauce, there are plenty of other ways you can bump it up to an even tastier level with different ingredients. First: your spices. Apple sauce often includes spices like mace, cardamom, and cinnamon, which all go well with the nutty flavors of browned butter. Among our list of other uncommon spices you should start cooking with is green cardamom, which offers a sweet and slightly spicy aromatic taste that suits the mellow blend of apples and sugar nicely. Star anise gives your apple sauce a warm and inviting flavor, and juniper berries add some citrus zing.

Other popular pairings for apple sauce include maple syrup and honey for extra sweetness, or adding a splash of bourbon. Bourbon is a relatively sweet liquor with common notes of honey, maple, caramel, and vanilla, so it offsets the savory-sweetness of the brown butter and the fruity apple sauce divinely. Just be sure to add the bourbon during the cooking process if you're making your own apple sauce, since that cooks off some of the sharp alcoholic taste. You might want to avoid directly adding bourbon to store-bought apple sauce that you don't need to cook. However, you can always pour it into your browned butter and heat it in a skillet to cook it down a bit before adding it in. Either way, you'll end up with a delicious, nutty, buttery, sweet snack that will leave you craving more.