Forget chopping or slicing cloves of garlic, the secret sauce to this concoction is crushing the garlic with sea salt in a mortar and pestle. The sea salt brings out the oil in the garlic so together they form a super smooth, silky paste that mixes with the butter just perfectly!
This recipe is so simple, you’ll love it! Thanks to a few basic ingredients, you’ll be putting this together in no time – and it freezes just beautifully too. There are a few notes here, but if you can’t wait, just head to the bottom of the page to check out the full instructions.
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Now, most mortar and pestles are simply huge and can also be quite heavy and unwieldy, so it took me a long time to find this small and narrow one that would fit in my bijou kitchen.
I love the fact it has high sides because you can crush ingredients against its edges and so don’t need to keep scraping the ingredients down to the middle like you would with a traditional bowl-shaped mortar.
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Before you get to work with the mortar and pestle, make the garlic easier to crush by pressing down on the clove with the flat side of a non-sharp knife to smash it first.
You’ll need to keep crushing the garlic and salt together in the pestle and mortar for a couple of minutes until they’re really smooth, but that’s about the most time-consuming part of this super-simple recipe.
Once you have the garlic paste together, you’re almost ready to mix all of the ingredients. I have been making this for a long time and I use two garlic cloves to one cup of butter. I find that amount is pretty garlicky, but you may want to experiment with that more or less to find your own goldilocks quantity, so it tastes just right!
Just before I mix everything, I ‘beat’ the softened butter and the olive oil with a fork for a couple of minutes to get them nice and fluffy. Then it’s time to mix it all together.
Et voila! The finished garlic butter. It’s a beautiful thing. All you need is some toasted sourdough bread or your favorite pizza crust!
Now, what a lot of people do is roll this up in Saran wrap and freeze it so that when they want to use it for fish or steak, or something else, they can just slice a piece off.
I’d like to say I do the same but it usually doesn’t hang around that long! If I made this recipe is larger quantities, however, then I definitely would wrap it and freeze it. To make this recipe in a larger quantity, simply multiply the ingredients according to how much you need.
Crazy good homemade garlic butter!
This mouthwatering homemade garlic butter is so good, you’ll even be putting it on your breakfast!
- 1 cup unsalted butter, softened
- 2 cloves garlic, peeled
- 1/2 tsp coarse sea salt
- 1 tbsp flat-leaf parsley, chopped
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- Take the peeled garlic cloves and crush them lightly under the flat blade of a knife.
- Put the garlic cloves into a pestle and mortar, along with the sea salt and crush them into a smooth paste.
- Mix the olive oil into the softened butter and beat with a fork for 1-2 minutes until fluffy.
- Mix the garlic paste, and the chopped parsley into the butter and stir well to combine. Add more salt if needed.
- Garlic butter can be refrigerated until used or frozen.
Clever cooking utensils I used for this recipe
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