This is a restaurant plate you can actually build at home, and the sauce is three ingredients. A halved Camus artichoke heart, a fine dice of carrot, celeriac and peas, roasted langoustines, and a sauce made by emulsifying orange juice and the artichoke cooking liquid into Bordier yuzu butter. Nothing is complicated on its own. The work is in the knife, and Bordier puts the preparation at 40 minutes.
At a glance
- Difficulty: Medium
- Serves: 4
- Active time: 40 minutes
- Cook: 25 minutes for the artichokes, plus a few minutes to roast the langoustines
- Key ingredient: Yuzu Bordier Butter
Why this works
Jean-Yves Bordier made the yuzu butter in 2006 after a trip to Japan. It is lightly salted butter carrying yuzu, a citrus that sits somewhere between grapefruit, mandarin and lime, more floral than any of them and considerably less sweet. That profile is the reason this dish holds together. Langoustines are delicate and slightly sweet, artichokes are earthy and faintly bitter, and citrus is the traditional bridge between the two. Using yuzu butter rather than butter plus lemon means the acid arrives already softened by cream, so it lifts the shellfish instead of stripping it.
The technique is a classic butter emulsion, just built in the pan. You cook the artichokes, sweat the brunoise in yuzu butter, moisten it with orange juice, and then whisk cold butter into the combined artichoke and orange liquid until it turns glossy and coats a spoon. The butter has to go in cold and the liquid must not boil, because an emulsion that gets too hot splits into oil and water and never comes back. Orange juice does double duty: it is sweet enough to round off the yuzu and it carries enough body to hold the emulsion together.
Ingredients
Cut the carrot and celeriac to the same small dice so they cook evenly. That brunoise is most of the 40 minutes.
| Ingredient | Metric | US |
|---|---|---|
| Camus artichokes | 2 | 2 |
| Lemon | 1 | 1 |
| Shallot | 1 | 1 |
| White wine | 10 cl (100 ml) | 3.4 fl oz (a scant 1/2 cup) |
| Langoustines, size 16/20 (16 to 20 per kilo) | Quantity not specified | See the FAQ below |
| Carrots | 2 | 2 |
| Celeriac (celery root) | 200 g | 7 oz |
| Peas | 200 g | 7 oz (about 1 1/2 cups) |
| Oranges | 2 | 2 |
| Yuzu Bordier butter | 100 g | 3.5 oz |
Method
Step 1: Turn and cook the artichokes
Peel the artichokes down to the hearts and slice them in two, setting aside a few of the leaves for the garnish. Cover the sliced artichokes with cold water and lemon juice, just enough to submerge them, which stops them oxidising and going brown. Cook them for 25 minutes.
Step 2: Build the brunoise and roast the langoustines
Cut the carrots and celeriac into a fine brunoise and boil them separately from the peas. Sweat the vegetables in yuzu butter and moisten with orange juice. Shell the langoustines and roast them.
Step 3: Emulsify and plate
Set a half artichoke into a deep serving dish. Add two or three of the reserved leaves. Spoon over the vegetable brunoise and the sauce, made by emulsifying the artichoke cooking liquid and orange juice with the yuzu butter, and top with the langoustines.
Tips from our kitchen
- Keep the artichoke water. The recipe asks you to emulsify the sauce with artichoke and orange juice, so ladle out a few spoonfuls of the cooking liquid before you drain the pot. It is faintly bitter and slightly sweet, and it is what makes the sauce taste of the dish rather than of butter.
- Reserve some butter cold for the sauce. Bordier gives one figure of 100 g for both sweating the vegetables and building the emulsion, without splitting it. Our guidance is to use about a third for the pan and keep the rest cold and cubed for the sauce. Butter whisked in cold, off direct heat, is what makes an emulsion glossy instead of oily.
- Do not let the sauce boil. Once the butter is in, the liquid should barely tremble. If it splits, pull it off the heat, add a spoonful of cold water, and whisk hard from the centre outward. Recovery works about half the time, which is a good argument for not boiling it.
- Langoustines cook faster than you think. Shelled tails need one to two minutes in a hot pan, turning once. They are done when the flesh turns from translucent to opaque white. Another 30 seconds and they go cottony, and no sauce fixes that.
- Camus artichokes are large and round. If your market only has small purple poivrade artichokes, they need much less than 25 minutes, so start checking at 10. A knife tip should slide into the heart with no resistance.
- Salt the peas separately. Bordier boils the peas apart from the root vegetables for a reason: carrot and celeriac need several minutes, peas need two or three, and peas boiled to the carrots' schedule turn grey.
How to serve it
Serve it warm, in shallow bowls, as a first course before something plain. It does not want a starch alongside, but it does want bread to finish the sauce. A dry white with some acid works, and so does a Breton cider. If you like this style of cooking, where a flavoured butter does the seasoning rather than a long list of aromatics, the Maison Bordier collection has ten more butters that behave the same way.
Where to buy Bordier Yuzu Butter in the US
The French Pantry ships Bordier butter across the United States in insulated overnight packaging, straight from the workshop in Brittany.
- Churned Yuzu Butter by Bordier (4.4 oz): lightly salted butter with yuzu, created in 2006 after a trip to Japan, and the best of the range for shellfish.
For the rest of the flavoured butters, browse the Maison Bordier collection.
Frequently asked questions
How much Bordier yuzu butter do I need?
The recipe calls for 100 g. A Bordier block is 4.4 oz (125 g), so one block covers this dish for four with a little left over. If you plan to make it twice, buy two.
How many langoustines should I buy?
Bordier gives the size grade, 16/20, meaning 16 to 20 langoustines per kilo, but never states a quantity. That is a gap in the source rather than something we can look up. Our guidance is three to four per person, so 12 to 16 in total, which at that grade is roughly 800 g to 1 kg whole.
Can I substitute another butter?
The closest substitute in the range is the Lemon-Olive Oil butter, which brings citrus from a different angle and still emulsifies well. Plain salted Bordier butter also works if you add citrus zest yourself, though you lose the floral edge that makes yuzu worth using here.
What are the shallot and white wine for?
Both appear in Bordier's ingredient list but never in the method, so we have left them in the table as published rather than invent a step. Our own reading is that they belong to a shallot reduction for the sauce base, and if you want to use them, sweat the sliced shallot, deglaze with the wine, reduce it almost dry, then add the artichoke and orange juice before mounting the butter. Treat that as our suggestion, not Bordier's.
How should I store the butter?
Keep it wrapped and refrigerated, and cut only what you need. Flavoured butters absorb neighbouring smells quickly, so keep the block away from anything strong in the fridge. Press the paper back onto the cut face after each use.
Does Bordier butter need refrigeration?
Yes. Bordier butter is a fresh, hand-churned product and ships cold. Refrigerate it on arrival, and for this recipe keep the portion destined for the sauce cold right up to the moment it goes into the pan.
Related reading
- Bordier Butter: What It Is, Why Chefs Love It, and How to Use It
- How to Choose Your French Butter: A Buyer's Guide
- La Brújula Spanish Conservas
Recipe and photograph adapted from Maison Bordier, with thanks. The French Pantry is an authorized US retailer of Bordier butter.