Ghee is quite cheap and easy to make by yourself, so long as you use a good butter. A lot cheaper than the ready made stuff, I’ve found.
Out of curiosity, how much Ghee can you make out of butter (I.e. start with 16 oz of butter, get approx 8 oz? Or how much?)
0. Be from a family line that consumes gallons up gallons of curd/yogurt weekly.
1. Curd Process - Boil whole milk, let it cool down a bit, and add some older curd, let it sit overnight in your oven with the light on.
2. The next morning, put the container in the refrigerator.
3. At night, you'll notice a think layer of creamy butter on top of the curd. Scrape that layer off the curd and transfer it into a container that you will store in your freezer. Enjoy the curd.
4. Repeat steps 0-3 over a few days, which will cause you to have a container full of creamy butter.
5. When you need ghee, melt the contents at medium heat while continuing to stir to maximize the ghee you'll make out of it. You will start seeing some particulate forming at the bottom
6. Filter and transfer the melted contents into your ghee container.
7. Turn off the stove but continue stirring the particulate matter with some added sugar for a tasty sweet.
8. Rinse Repeat.
If you just want "butter that doesn't burn", here's what I do.
1. Melt butter in a pot. This separates butter into its three fundamental parts: solids (floating at the top), oil (in the middle), and water.
2. Heat until all the water at the bottom vaporizes.
3. Pour remaining mixture through a coffee filter. This removes the solids (which easily burn).
Milk Solids burn at 350F, making raw butter unsuitable for frying. The goal of clarified butter (and Ghee is a type of clarified butter), is to raise the smoke-point to roughly 450F (roughly equivalent to canola oil).
Normal butter will burn before the mallard reaction (Mallard is roughly 400F). But clarified butter burns AFTER the mallard reaction. The mallard reaction is what makes the slightly-sweet nicely cooked meat taste.
Similar reactions occur in vegetables, meats, breads, etc. etc. So its very important to use oils which burn at higher temperatures (450F+: Clarified Butter, Canola Oil, Soy Oil, Peanut Oil).
Some fats, such as normal-butter, bacon fat, or olive oil burn at 350F. So you end up with a "burnt" taste from the burning fat before the mallard reaction even takes place.
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Ghee is a particular "cooked butter" taste. Its a bit more difficult to make (and more expensive than) simple clarified butter.
If you're sauteing, frying, or whatever with butter, its important to know how to clarify it. Or I guess use Ghee (but that's more expensive / time consuming).
I was more looking for a substitute for shortening, which I think clarified butter can do? Or just ghee?
Ex, bacon grease works in more recipes than you'd expect.
Just memorize their smoke points, the point where a fat begins to burn. Shortening has a very high smoke point, but that is only relevant if you expect the temperature to go above 400F, such as the mallard reaction (aka the taste of fried / saute food).
You'll learn pretty quick when a fat burns quickly. Olive oil and bacon grease burn at really low temperatures and will create a thick cloud of smoke as it burns.
Look up the smoke points of fats if you are worried.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cookin...
If I choose a 450F smoke point fat, like canola oil, I know that the pan is 450F when it starts to smoke.
I got the reaction wrong earlier, mallard is 300F or so. Caramelization is 400F
But in that case, like I say in my longer comment, it doesn't make sense for olive oil to catch fire "easily", like you say in your previous comment.
What olive oil are you using, if I'm not being too nosey?
Sorry if I sound defensive- I'm just really surprised. olive oil is very common where I come from :)
I don't cook with olive oil too often, so I can't say I remember the brand. I looked a few things up, and it seems like different olive-oils have different smoke points.
https://www.jonbarron.org/diet-and-nutrition/healthiest-cook...
According to this, some olive oil has a smoke point of 320F / 160C, but other olive-oils can have a smoke point as high as 468F. I don't know why olive oil has such a different range.
I guess I'll experiment with olive oil more. It is quite possible that olive oil here in the USA is of lower-quality perhaps?
Olive oil quality can depend on many things: where it comes from, how it is made, who makes it, etc.
The one that's considered best is olive oil produced only from olives (i.e. no kernels) and only by mechanical means (specifically: no heat and no chemical treatments; so it's called "cold-extracted"). That's the quality that's sold as "extra virgin olive oil" though from what I understand there is no strict standard for what that means exactly.
Then there's provenance. Generally, Spanish olive oil is considered best with Greek second (unless you ask a Greek of course) and Italian a distant third. Other countries in the Med also make it, e.g. Morocco etc. Italian olive oil has often been found to be adulterated, substituted for lower quality olive oils or just to be a mix of non-Italian olive oils (primarily Greek, apparently) so it's a case of not knowing what you eat.
Anyway, I live in the UK where olive oil is imported and the good stuff tends to be expensive (£30ish for 25lt of Greek extra virgin but of course most people will buy smaller bottles that are more expensive). So my guess is that most olive oil consumed outside the Med tends to be of inferior quality, just because people don't know it well enough to justify spending the price.
So if you experiment with it- get the good stuff. To be honest, I just get the stuff I always do and I have never had to think about quality or smoke points, so my advice is probably a little vague.
Er. You won't set your house on fire just because some crazy Greek person on the internets said it's safe to cook with olive oil, eh? :)
I was wondering about that because it's mentioned in the article also: I don't understand why people say that olive oil burns easily.
Look at the table you posted: the smoking point of two qualities of olive oil ("virgin" and "extra virgin, low acidity, high quality") is above 400°F (204°C) at 410°F and 405°F respectively. This is close to the 400°F you cite as the temperature necessary for the Maillard reaction, but the wikipedia article on the Maillard reaction states that: "The reaction is a form of non-enzymatic browning which typically proceeds rapidly from around 140 to 165 °C (280 to 330 °F)." In which case, even "extra virgin" olive oil, the olive oil quality listed as having the lowest smoking point of 160°C, can withstand the heat necessary for food to undergo the Maillard reaction.
It makes even less sense that the Maillard reaction needs 400°F to get going. If you look at the wikipedia article for "Smoking point", where the table you link to comes from, it lists the average temperatures of frying and baking:
Pan frying (sauté) on stove top heat: 120 °C (248 °F)
Deep frying: 160 - 180 °C (320 °F - 356 °F)
Oven baking: Average of 180 °C (356 °F)
Finally, I'm the third generation of women in my family to cook with olive oil, to always cook with olive oil and to cook everything with olive oil. I fry, deep fry, boil, stir-fry, bake, sear, and so on everything with olive oil. I have never seen olive oil burning (emitting a blue flame and smoke) and I've never heard of anyone in my family, or in my broad circle of friends and acquaintances who has seen that. I have never heard it in the news either and if it was something that happens to olive oil when the food you're cooking with it is about to get tasty- it should be happening all the time [Edit: note that I've burned plenty of food in olive oil- but still not the olive oil].
Small point to note: I'm Greek and we do have good quality olive oil (and wine; and feta; and yoghurt; and nothing else).
So my conclusion is: it's only cheap, low quality and most likely adulterated olive oil that catches fire in low temperatures.
(See the wikipedia article on olive oil about adulteration. It's a big thing in some other oil-producing countries, and I don't mean Saudi Arabia).
I learned recently that curdling milk can be achieved in many different ways: the easiest way is to leave it out of the fridge overnight (unless it's long-life). Especially in a warm environment the lactobacili in the milk itself and in the air will do their job and you'll have curdled milk in the morning. I'm guessing that's probably how the first dairy products were made, though I wouldn't want to speculate about the tastes of the first person to try curdled milk.
Another way is to add some acid like vinegar or lemon. Lactobacili that curdle the milk naturally actually release lactic acid: fermentation is the same kind of anaerobic respiration that happens in our muscles when they're not getting enough energy from oxygen alone. In our case, it's our body burning the sugars in our fat to create lactic acid. The lactobacili in the milk eat lactose and turn it into lactic acid. It seems that this acid production is at least partly responsible for the curdling of milk.
Another common way is to use, er, whey- the byproduct of milk fermentation. Some traditional cheeses (e.g. Greek mizithra and anthotyros) are made by keeping some of the whey in previous batches to ferment new batches.
Yet another way is to use a bacterial culture especially meant to ferment milk, like kefir (please: it's pronounced keh-FEER; not like Donald Sutherland's son). In fact, I learned all this because I started making kefir at home and I got to the point I'm making cheese. It turns out- you can use kefir to make butter also, although I haen't tried it and I don't know the process well enough to describe it.
Finally, there is of course the use of rennet, which is an enzyme found in the er, I think fourth stomach of ruminants, and that's used mainly in cheese making (especially for hard cheeses, it's the stuff that gives yellow cheese curds their texture).
Anyway, fermentation -as in milk curdling, wine brewing, sourdough making etc- is cool.
Took me a few goes to get it right. I find it has a better taste, used appropriately.
I know I can start with a pound and fit it in a pint jar, just below the line.