What Ghee Is

You must have heard about such a product as ghee. If you don’t know what it is, you might think it’s some kind of vegetable oil or animal fat. However, in fact, ghee is something that looks a lot like clarified butter. But of course, there are some differences.

So, 5-Minute Crafts decided to find out more about ghee and tell you why it’s different from regular clarified butter.

Description

Ghee is basically regular clarified butter with a little different production process and a different final taste. Ghee is very popular in India cuisine. It’s added to the famous curry and used in meals where the ingredients need to be fried on the frying pan to make them crunchy. (We’re going to tell why later). Ghee has an oily, nutty flavor, and golden color.

Ghee is composed almost entirely of fat, 62% of which consists of saturated fats. Ghee is full of cholesterol and also contains a little bit of lactose and casein, so little in fact, that people with lactose intolerance can also eat it.

How to make it

Regular clarified butter is the butter with water and milk solids removed through boiling. The quickest way to make clarified butter is to melt it, remove the foam (which is the milk particles), and then pour the butter into a different container.

But it’s a bit different with ghee. Foam is not removed when it’s boiled. The butter keeps boiling until all the water evaporates and the foam becomes brown and goes to the bottom. After that, the butter is carefully strained. Ghee helps foods become very crunchy and has a very high smoke point of 450°F compared to 350°F of the regular butter.

Storing and using

You can store an open jar with ghee for up to 3 months in an open kitchen drawer, and up to a year in a fridge. At low temperatures, ghee solidified but once you take it out of the fridge, it melts. Remember that water can ruin ghee and shorten its shelf life. It’s necessary to protect ghee from sunlight and other light (it may lead to moisture appearing in the jar).

You can use ghee in very different ways, for example:

• cook curry
• add to fried potatoes to make them crunchy
• shrimp with garlic
• popcorn — it will remain crunchy for a very long time
• stewed vegetables
• frying steak

Be careful with ghee when cooking pastry because the dough might be hard to control, and the pastry will be easy to ruin.