Garlic Butter Sauce

This Garlic Butter Sauce uses a mounted butter technique to create a beautiful sauce with only a few ingredients.

What Is Garlic Butter Sauce?

But if you want an amazing garlic butter sauce with a saucier texture that looks creamier, you’ll want to do the mounted butter technique. Seriously, this sauce will look a bit like you’ve added some kind of cream to it, but it’s just the butter and liquid that have been emulsified together.

Mounted butter is essentially just emulsifying butter with a liquid. Emulsifying is mixing together two ingredients that do not usually combine easily, a fat or oil and a water-based ingredient like broth, vinegar, or wine into a semi-stable mixture.

How To Make Garlic Butter Sauce

First, make sure that you are starting with cold butter. This is important and the sauce won’t turn out correctly with room temperature butter.

Bring the garlic and your chosen liquid to a simmer over high heat. I like to use a dry white wine, but you can also use water with lemon juice, or I’ve even made it with a dry rose wine in a pinch. If you want a stronger garlic flavor, you can absolutely use more than is called for in the recipe below. Reduce to low and wait for it to stop simmering.

Whisk in 1 tablespoon of cold, unsalted butter at time, whisking continuously until almost fully melted before adding the next tablespoon. Continue to whisk and add in butter 1 tablespoon at a time, adding the next tablespoon just before the previous one melts. You want to be whisking continuously to create the emulsion. Remove from heat when all the butter is incorporated, then season with salt to taste.

The finished sauce is a bit thicker than if you just melted butter, with a creamy texture. It doesn’t seem oily the way melted butter does, instead, it’s creamy and luscious.

Once you make the sauce, keep it warm and use immediately. It will separate otherwise. You can’t really make it ahead or use the leftovers. If you have leftovers, refrigerate them, then warm them and use them as melted butter. It won’t stay emulsified.

Can You Make Garlic Butter Sauce Ahead Of Time?

Yes and no. I say yes because you can heat it up but it will be more like melted butter. You then are able to turn it back into a sauce by adding more butter and whisking it, see below. But, if you’re doing that, you might as well just have made the sauce when you needed it anyhow. So then I say it’s not worth making it ahead. 

Can You Refrigerate This Sauce?

If you’re thinking about making this sauce ahead and refrigerating it, it’s not worth doing. See above. However, if you made the sauce, used some of it, and then want to refrigerate the leftovers to use, this salvaging of the sauce by re-emulsifying it, as explained below, will work.

When you refrigerate the sauce, it turns into a solid, like cold butter but slightly spreadable, with a slightly gritty texture. If you let it soften at room temperature, you’ll see that the emulsification hasn’t held. Similarly, you can warm it slowly in the microwave (use defrost or power level 50% and do 15 seconds at a time and then stir) or in a saucepan over low, and it will also separate, or usually separate. However, you can save the sauce. 

How To Save A Broken Butter Sauce

Add more butter! So, if you’re keeping the sauce warm after making it and it separates with an oily layer, or if you’re attempting to reheat refrigerated sauce and it is separated, you can save it.

What you do is to heat it up so that it is just warm, not at all hot. Then, add in 1 tablespoon of cold butter. Whisk it really really well until it melts in. You are essentially emulsifying the whole sauce with that 1 tablespoon. If it sort of works but not quite fully, add another tablespoon and whisk some more.

Using Garlic Butter Sauce

This garlic butter sauce recipe is perfect for serving with lobster tail or shrimp. You could also drizzle some over steak and potatoes. It’s delicious on roasted veggies or tossed with pasta for a simple pasta sauce.