Chef Gerli Travkin champions brown butter in cooking

Chef Gerli Travkin told ERR’s Terevisioon that home cooks should consider using brown butter, which she said gives dishes a deeper nutty and caramelised flavour.

Travkin, head chef at Fotografiska, prepared a healthy dish using Hokkaido pumpkin. She said the pumpkin is nearly waste-free because both its skin and seeds can be eaten, and described it as sweeter, with a silkier and denser texture.

“I have caramelised the milk whey. Brown butter is a super product, and I recommend making it at home,” Travkin said. She explained that butter can simply be left in a pan until it browns, but warned that it needs to be watched because it can quickly burn.

Travkin said she uses brown butter in both sweet and savoury dishes. She also recommended it in any baking recipe that calls for butter because, in her view, it produces a much better flavour.

For the dish, Travkin cut the pumpkin into large pieces, coated them with brown butter and roasted them in a 200-degree oven for 30 minutes. She then fried the roasted pieces in a pan and served them with Kalamatsi goat cheese, sea buckthorn berries and greens.

At the restaurant, she said, leftover pumpkin skins and seeds are dried in the oven and turned into “pumpkin fairy dust”. She also noted that the Middle East has a spice mixture called dukkah.

Travkin said pumpkin could be used in many different ways and encouraged people to eat more of it.

She also shared a simple marinade formula: one part sugar, one part water and one part vinegar, such as apple cider or wine vinegar. Garlic, bay leaves and peppercorns can be added according to taste.