Ramsløg Smør / Ramps Butter

Every year the fiance's dad's side of the family gets together for an Easter lunch at his aunt's summerhouse. His parents' summerhouse is right next door and on Saturday they mentioned that their neighbors had a lot of ramsløg/ramps growing on their property. Walking around the property, you could really smell the onion and garlicky odor that these wild herbs were omitting. I forgot to mention the other day that we enjoyed some bread with an amazingly smooth and creamy ramps butter at St Pauls Apothek in Aarhus. It was so good, we even dipped our bread into the butter as if it was a sauce at one point. Oops! So when the fiance and I heard that we could pick some of the neighbors ramps (they were cool with it), we picked a bunch and decided to try and recreate the delicious butter we had in Aarhus.

By the way, if you are interested in finding some ramsløg or ramps in Copenhagen, check out this website. It is a great place to find different herbs and fruit in the city! Also, be careful when picking these herbs. They look similar to some other plants like Lilly of the Valley which are poisonous to eat! There is some info here on how to distinguish between ramps and similar looking but dangerous plants.

If you like garlic butter you will love ramps butter. Ramps tastes like a mix of garlic and chives. The fiance and I made two batches of this butter. With my batch I simply chopped up some of the ramps leaves and mixed it into my whipped butter. For the fiance's batch, he bashed the ramps in the mortar and made it into a paste before we incorporated it into the butter. Either way, they are delicious and if you find yourself with some ramsløg or ramps this spring, enjoy and preserve it in the form of ramsløg smør or ramps butter!

For our butters, we softened about 200g of organic salted butter and whipped it with our handmixer before adding either chopped ramps or ramps paste into the butter and whipping it again. We used a range from 10 to 20 leaves per batch of butter. It is really up to you how strong you want the ramps flavor in your butter to be. You can store your ramps butter in an airtight container for a week, and if you are like us and have made a lot of butter, you can drop some of the butter onto some cling film and roll it up into a log. Wrap the log of butter with some tin foil and freeze to enjoy later! Also, letting your butter sit for a day or two will allow the ramps flavor to deepen. It gets even better with time! Eat your ramps butter on some freshly baked bread or try cooking with it!