Recipe: Ramp Butter

I've got ten years of ramp photos on my phone. That ages me a little, but it's the truth — every April since 2016, our kitchen has been a ramp frenzy. Foraging, fermenting, grilling, sautéing, whatever the haul will take. And the one thing I make every single year, the thing I actually count on, is ramp butter.

Ramp butter is unsalted butter folded with raw chopped ramps and a little salt, rolled into a log, and kept in the freezer. That's the whole recipe. I never thought to post it because it's so easy it felt like cheating. After all, it's just ramps, softened butter, and salt. But it's the single most useful thing to do with a bunch of ramps if you want to be eating them past mid-May.

How to make ramp butter

Two things matter, and that's it.

First: leave the ramps raw. We love cooking ramps — grilled, sautéed, tossed into pasta, folded into eggs. Just not in this butter. Raw ramps carry every bit of their spring punch: the green, garlicky, slightly hot top note that's the whole reason you went to the trouble of getting ramps in the first place. Save the cooking for the other April ramp dishes. This one wants them raw.

Second: chop fine. Ramps have a soft leafy top and a firmer white-to-pink bulb. Both go in. You're making a butter you want to spread on warm bread, not one you want to pick through, so take an extra thirty seconds with the knife.

From there it's mechanical. Soften a stick of unsalted butter on the counter, fold the ramps and salt through it with a spatula, then spoon the mixture onto a piece of parchment in a long line. Roll the parchment up tight so you've got a log, and twist the ends. Into the fridge for what you're eating this week, into the freezer for what you're eating in August.

What to do with a log of ramp butter

Honestly, almost anything. A coin of it melting on a just-seared steak is the highest-leverage use of ramp butter there is. A few slices under the skin of a whole roast chicken before it goes in the oven is a close second. It's extraordinary on eggs, fried or scrambled or on toast. Stir a tablespoon into pasta water and you have a ramp butter sauce in thirty seconds.

The one we actually do the most, though, is the simplest one: a thick slice off the log, straight onto hot bread.

A note on harvesting

If you're foraging your own, harvest lightly. Ramps propagate slowly — a patch you find this year was probably there ten years ago, and it takes a light touch to keep it around for another ten. We go into the foraging ethics in more detail in our Ramp Kraut recipe and Ramp Kimchi recipe, both written during the same April-ramp-frenzy season that this one came out of. The short version: take one leaf per plant, skip the bulb unless you're on private land with permission, and don't clear more than about 10% of any patch. If you want to be set up for it, our Foraging Tool Kit has the harvesting knife and brush we actually use.

If you're buying ramps at the farmer's market in April, which is just as much of a ramp tradition as foraging them, a single bunch is plenty for a full batch of ramp butter. The recipe below scales up easily if you happen to come home with more.

Accept that April is all about ramps. Then make the butter, freeze most of it, and be extremely glad about that decision in October.