Whipped Miso Butter: great on almost everything!

We had miso butter on good bread as part of selection of fancy butters at restaurant Tartaria: it was delicious, a little exotic, but still familiar. We whipped some up recently and found it was really tasty on just about anything: beans, steak, toast, potatoes, and as an ingredient in other dishes instead of plain butter. It's dead simple to make.

Recipes we've found tend to use 5:1 or 4:1 butter to miso, but I wanted to make the salty umami of the miso a little more forward, so I'm bumping it to 3:1; adjust according to your taste. Some recipes add garlic, sriracha, olive oil, or other flavors, but keeping it minimal makes it more versatile.  Some recipes melt the butter then whip in the miso over an ice bath, but that's needlessly fussy; this just takes a little planning ahead to soften the butter. You can use whatever style of Miso you prefer; we used a white miso for this because it's what we had from a local Asian market.

The photos show us using a mini food processor but I've switched to using a whisk attachment on a stick blender as it's easier. We have a little mini food processor attachment for our stick blender and it works well for this quantity. If you have a large processor, you'll probably need to scale up the recipe. If you have neither, a single beater on an electric mixer would probably work too.  If you're trapped on a desert island, you could just smear it together with a fork once the Miso and Butter are soft enough.

150 g Butter
 50 g Miso Paste

Cut the butter into cubes directly into the bowl of a mini food processor while measuring.
Likewise, measure the Miso into the same processor bowl.
Let the butter soften for 30 minutes or more at room temperature so it's easy to mix.
Whiz it, whiz it good, scooping down occasionally until it's uniform and smooth.
Store in a covered container, or wrap in parchment into a log shape, then refrigerate.

This amount only lasted a week in our house!

This firms up rather solid in the fridge; we may try adding a bit of Olive Oil so it's more spreadable.