Craft Wars: Ghee!

 घृत

The other night I made ghee, or clarified butter, with my friends Tom and Christie. We used directions from my favorite new homesteading site, An Organic Wife. Here’s how it went:

We started with 6 pounds of Strauss organic butter. I insisted on Strauss because, as far as I can tell, it’s the best non-factory-farmed local butter supplier around. It’s pricey, but I’ll do anything for the animals. (Anything except actually be vegan.)

We melted the butter slowly in a big ol’ pan until it got foamy on top. Then, we used a slotted spoon to skim off the foamy part until the melted butter was eventually totally clear. The directions and the YouTube videos we watched all said this would take about 5-10 minutes. Maybe because we’re novice ghee makers with shoddy technique and terrible ADD, it actually took more like 30.

Looks like medical waste, is actual delicious wholesome clarified butter, which we strained through cheesecloth before putting in jars.

Making labels is always the most fun part of any craft project.

When you clarify butter, you get rid of the “milk solids” (lactose and casein) and you’re left with the pure butterfat. While the idea of getting rid of the proteins and keeping just the fat seems counterintuitive to health, clarified butterfat is considered “good fat” and has several things going for it: 

• It keeps longer at room temp. 
• It can be cooked at a higher temp for longer without burning, making it a great replacement for saturated oils. 
• If you’re sensitive to lactose, you can probably handle ghee.

In Ayurveda and in many Eastern cultures, ghee is considered a panacea for just about everything. I am on the fence about the subtle science behind ghee’s cure-all properties, but I’m certainly sold on its flavor and its winning attributes as a cooking fat.