How to clarify butter

Butter.  Wholesome yummy butter.  Most innocent victim of the Lipid Hypothesis, which blames cardio-vascular diseases on dietary fat.  Which was even supplanted in my own childhood fridge with vile, contemptible margarine.  We parted ways, though I remembered butter fondly, like a childhood crush.  Coconut oil helped salve the wound, with its abundance of medium chain fatty acids.

Fatty acids, the building blocks of life, literally the f-ing building blocks, fat is the stuff every cell wall in your body is made out of.  Some of these our bodies can’t make, so it’s essential that we get them from our diet.  They get a special name: Essential Fatty Acids.  There are two types, Omega-3 and Omega-6.   An ideal ratio of these is 1:1, and when there gets to be more than 4x the amount of Omega-6, then it starts causing problems.  Most Americans have a ratio of 20:1 (that’s Omega-6 to Omega-3).  What this means for us is that if we want to bring that ratio back in line, we need to avoid sources of Omega-6 (vegetable oils, soy oil) and eat more Omega-3 (walnuts, fish, flax, healthy animals).

Imagine my joy when I discovered that when grazing animals eat grass like they’re supposed to, their meat and milk produce better Omega-3 fats than fish-oil.  Try to eat grass-fed meat, and you’ll be keeping things in range.  Now if only we could eat the butter without the problems associated with dairy. And wouldn’t you know it, there is.

Butter is primarily fats (80%) with milk solids and water mixed in.  Were you to clarify it, which is to remove the milk solids and water, you’d have pure high-quality fat.  You could also use ghee, which is clarified butter in which the milk solids break down and brown, but I enjoy the flavor of the pure clarified butter.

So here is how you do it.

First get some good butter.  As you can see in this picture I used Kerry Gold and Organic Valley.  Kerry Gold ($9.98/lb)comes from Ireland and all of its cows are grass-fed.  Organic Valley (~$6.00/lb) is in the US and claims the same.  I got these at Stadium Thriftway.  While there I also saw some Amish butter ($5.09/lb), which when I looked it up later, looks legit.  Amish aren’t into factory farming.  As a point of comparison, the Darigold standard factory-produced butter cost $6.30/lb.

I got a pound of each.  Next time, if they have it, I’ll try the Amish butter.  I got two because I wanted to compare them.

Next, put them over medium-low heat.  You can watch them melt into milk solids and fats while the water gently steams off.

I noticed that the OV melted faster and separated more completely, with all of the solids rising quickly to the surface.  The KG had more stuff floating at the bottom of the pan.

Take a spoon or spatula and skim across the surface of the liquid to consolidate the solids.  I used the spatula to skim at first, but I later switched to a spoon to better scoop the stuff out.  When scooping, I put the waste onto a plate which I later rinsed in the sink.

After the first scoop, here is what it looked like.

You can see that it requires a little more than once through.  I found that when I heated it up a little (to a 3 on the dial), the solids rose to the surface better.

It took about 30 minutes from the time I took that first picture to this.  

The Kerry Gold took a little longer.  I wasted some time by trying to skim all of it when it wanted to stick to the bottom.  I later realized I could have just poured it out and the solids would have stuck to the pan.

To pour it, I put my tupperware on a plate.  You can see my plate and spoon for the solids in the back.

After a couple hours in the fridge, I have about 1.5 pounds of high quality fat which will last for nearly ever in the fridge, although I’ll never know.  Clarified butter is good as a cooking oil, but my favorite is just on top of whatever else I’m eating.

I’ve seen descriptions of this process where you allow the butter to cool before you skim, but I’ve found that the solids and fat don’t completely separate into convenient layers when you melt it.  Perhaps this changes as it cools, but reason #2 I don’t do this is because I was done in about 40 minutes, including clean-up.  I’m unwilling to wait when I know I can do a thorough job faster.

There you go.