After making butter using the best butter churner, while taking notes on my favorite sizzler cheese corn balls recipe, I got stuck to hearing the chef saying “melt a knob of butter” to glaze the recipe. Telling you the truth, not in my heartbeat, I know why the chef has used this adjective for measuring the quantity of butter while he could easily say a slice, teaspoon, or stick of butter. Well, it might be his personal preference! (what else i could say more?)
You might have also seen chefs using the edge of a spatula or a knife to cut a lump of butter and then saying “add a knob of butter” into the recipe. When watching these videos closely, you’ll discover that for every chef, the knob of butter measures a different quantity.
Then what exactly is the knob of butter? And how much does it need to be to prepare a finger-licking recipe? These two questions need to be addressed appropriately so that the next time you see a chef using this specific term, you know what exactly it does mean.
Let’s find out:
What Is A Knob Of Butter?
A knob of butter is an unquantified amount of butter. However, it is greater than a pat of butter and less than a stick of butter.
Most American cookbooks employ the term stick of butter while British cooks tend to use the term “knob of butter”. Where a stick of butter is worth ¼ cup or 8 tablespoons, a knob of butter measures somewhere between 1 teaspoon to 2 full tablespoons.
Cooking is different from baking and requires more guesswork when it comes to measuring ingredients. You don’t have to be precise while grilling a steak as you need to be while baking a simple teacake. This is the reason that all chefs don’t cook equally and the same recipe from two different chefs turns out as entirely different.
This is exactly true when you see chefs using different amounts of butter to describe a knob of butter in recipes.
Generally, a butter knife is used for taking out a lump of butter from a cubic-shaped butter. In appearance, it looks like scooped-up butter. It isn’t as big as a doorknob but is significantly bigger than a pat of butter placed on the tables in some restaurants. Perhaps, two or three times bigger in size than a pat.
How Much Is A Knob Of Butter?
Cooking is an art for some good reasons. You can be experimental as much as you want. So when you see a veteran chef using a knob of butter to cover the bottom of a pan and another just adding it on the top of a pancake, don’t get intimidated.
There isn’t one exact measurement for a knob of butter since it’s dependable and differs from recipe to recipe. It is upon your imagination and tastes how much quantity of butter you want in your meal. If you’re sauteing something, you significantly need a small knob of butter while for browning rice you need to cover a skillet and need a large knob of butter.
Likewise, some chefs use the term knob of butter in connection with some other ingredients to describe the precise measurement of butter. For example, chefs might use “an egg-sized knob of butter” when he requires a generous amount of butter in a recipe. Or another chef would instruct adding just “a knob of butter the size of a hazelnut” into a recipe.
That means you have to eyeball a recipe to measure the accurate amount of knob of butter.
