Simply, ghee is made by cooking butter. There’s a lot to unpack butt that’s for another post. This post is just a demonstration of one time I made ghee and took a lot of pictures. Making ghee is easy but you will need to be present; keeping an eye on the progress. Different brands of butter act differently in the cooking part and produce different flavours and colours.
Think of the last time you fried something using butter. Remember those little brown bits left in the frying pan? Those little bits are what you remove when you make ghee. on a low-medium-low heat the butter is slowly liquified and cooked (simmered?). The bubbles will go through recognizable stages but the thing to watch as the ghee cooks down is the formation of the proteins on the bottom of the pot. These will start out white, then darken to brown and finally turn black if you cook the ghee too long. Don’t cook it too long.
I never stir ghee while it’s cooking. Sometimes I’ll scoop the frothy bits off of the top of the liquid, sometimes I just let is cook (the froth will mostly disappear, anyway). Most any clean jar will work for storing ghee (you can store ghee on your counter; just like olive oil). My method for straining liquid ghee have changed since this pictures were taken, but here I used cheesecloth. You can let it cool for a few minutes before you strain it.
The smell is incredible! Ghee has a high smoke point and is fantastic for stirfrys—but it will burn if left on high temperatures. It will give everything in the pan a very nice nutty, buttery flavour.
[this is an abbreviated blog post]
