How to make your own ghee

by Marisa McClellan, Posted Sep 15th 2008 @ 10:02AM

Conventional wisdom when it comes to cooking with butter is that you need to be careful with it, as it has a fairly low smoke point. Often times, when I want the taste of butter in my food, I'll combine it with olive oil, to be able to take it up to a higher temperature and still get the flavor. However, there is a way to use butter so that you get the full flavor along with a remarkably high smoke point.

To do this, you need to make ghee (also known as clarified butter). A staple in Indian cooking, ghee is butter that has been boiled, so that the water evaporates and the milk solids cook off, so that all you're left with is solid butterfat. Over at Naturopath.ca, you can find helpful instructions as to how to make your own ghee (you can buy it at some health food stores, but making it at home isn't hard) as well as some recipes that specifically call for ghee.

Source

Filed Under: Ingredients, How To
Tags: clarified butter, ClarifiedButter, dairy, ghee, homemade ghee, HomemadeGhee, naturopath.ca

Chew on This

Royal Wedding Cake Details Revealed! - YumSugar

Make Your Own Pop Tarts - CHOW
Denny's Introduces a Maple Bacon Sundae - Eater
Whole Foods Opening Bars in Stores - USA Today
Rules Of Bar Etiquette -- For The Bartender - HuffPost Food

Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

9-15-2008 @10:20AM bug said... Places like Whole Foods also carry jars of ghee. I always keep a jar around, since it's much easier than having to clarify butter when I need it.
Reply

Vote upVote downReport

9-15-2008 @11:25AM Pete said... Cooking for Engineers has a good method of making Ghee as well, using a freezer bag: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/article/198/Clarified-Butter-II
Reply

Vote upVote downReport

9-15-2008 @12:26PM Matt said... Apparantly the idea of adding oil to butter to help prevent it from burning is a myth. According to James Peterson's book "Cooking", the thing that burns in butter is the milk solids. The milk solids burn at the temperature that milk solids burn at, and adding an oil with a higher smoke point is not going to change the fact that the milk solids burn at that temperature. Ghee is the way to go if you want to bring it to a higher temperature. Adding oil to butter does nothing for the burning.
Reply

Vote upVote downReport

9-15-2008 @12:34PM Tamara Kaye Sellman said... Your timing, as usual, is brilliant, Marisa. I literally bought a couple of pounds of butter from the store an hour ago so that I could make my own clarified butter. I have bought it from the store for the convenience of it in the past but we love using it so much that it makes better sense just to make our own. Thank you so much for the link.
http://rhymeswithcamera.blogspot.com
Reply

Vote upVote downReport

10-10-2008 @8:13PM Anjuli Ayer said... I find that buying ghee in a store is never the same. And it's never really ghee. It's best to make your own. I also have detailed instructions here:
http://asmartmouth.com/2008/10/10/homemade-indian-ghee-if-you-dare/

Anjuli
Reply