Brown butter ice cream

What brown butter tastes like

Brown butter ice cream tastes nutty and toffee-like. That flavor comes from one step: butter is cooked until its milk solids turn brown, then the butter is blended into the ice cream base.

The main flavorings are the browned butter itself and the toasted milk solids that come with it. Those little brown flecks stay in the mix, so the flavor runs all the way through each scoop rather than sitting on top as a swirl. The result is rich and rounded, with a toasty edge that plain butter does not have. Because the base is a custard, the texture is smooth and dense. Toasted pecans or a caramel swirl are optional extras if you want crunch or a sweeter ribbon.

Where brown butter comes from

How to make brown butter at home

The usual base style for brown butter ice cream is French custard, made with egg yolks. A Philadelphia base, with no eggs, also works. The Base Builder sets up a French custard base sized to your machine, in grams and cups. It gives a base formula built on standard food-science ranges, not a tested recipe.

To add the flavor, cook butter until it smells nutty and the solids are brown. Then whisk it, solids and all, into the warm base. Chill and churn the base as you normally would.

Toasted pecans or a caramel swirl are optional. Add them at the end of churning. In factory ice cream, pieces like nuts go in as the ice cream leaves the freezer, when about half of its water is frozen and it is about as soft as soft serve, which is why home cooks add them last. If you already have a brown butter recipe, the Recipe Scaler resizes it to your machine and converts cups to grams.

What to serve with brown butter

Brown butter ice cream goes well with fruit that has a gentle sweetness. Serve a scoop next to a slice of apple pie, baked apples or roasted pears. Fresh sliced pears work too.

For toppings, caramel sauce leans into the toffee notes. Toasted pecans add crunch and echo the nutty flavor of the browned butter. You can use both at once for a sundae that tastes a little like butter pecan.

• apple
• pears
• caramel sauce
• toasted pecans

How common brown butter is

Our badge for brown butter is a waxing crescent, 2 of 5, with the legend label "Hard to find." That means you should look for it in specialty shops and seasonal runs. The badge says how easy the flavor is to find, not how much people like it.

No survey we use lists brown butter by name. The badge is our editorial judgement alone of how easy it is to find. If you cannot find it near you, making it at home is a practical option.

No survey we use lists this flavor by name, so its badge is our own judgement of how easy it is to find.

Nutrition, roughly

FoodData Central has no record for brown butter ice cream itself, so the figures shown are for a plain vanilla base, regular to rich. Regular vanilla has 207 kcal, 11 g fat and 21.2 g sugars per 100 grams. Rich vanilla has 249 kcal and 16.2 g fat per 100 grams. Regular vanilla's 1/2 cup (66 g) portion has about 137 kcal. The browned butter, mix-ins and sweeteners you use change these numbers.