Cooking 101: Clarified Butter

October 8, 2008

This post is part of a series called Cooking 101, which introduces the basics of cooking. The series follows the book Culinary Fundamentals, with supplements from The Professional Chef by the Culinary Institute of America. Check out the previous posts here.

Unit 13: Basic Mise en Place

Part 2: Clarified Butter

I covered the definition and basics of mise en place in an earlier post, but there are few additional parts that I’d like to discuss for Cooking 101 in a bit more detail, including mirepoix, bouquet garni, sachet d’epices, roux, and clarified butter. You might notice that you don’t often see these terms in recipes, but my hope is that covering their uses will expand my overall knowledge of cooking and make it easier in the future to cook without recipes.

Today I’ll cover clarified butter – what it is and how to make it.

What Is Clarified Butter?

Clarified butter is pure butterfat. Butter normally consists of butterfat, milk solids, and some water, but the clarification process removes the latter two.

Why in the world would I want clarified butter?

Clarified butter can be used in a variety of circumstances. Perhaps most notably it can be cooked at a higher temperature than regular butter for techniques like sautéing since it is a pure fat. It also is often used to make roux and is found sometimes in hollandaise or bearnaise sauces.

Will you need this in your everyday cooking? Probably not – but there might be a time when you go, “Aha! Clarified butter would be perfect for this!” And then you will know what it is and how to make it. One can hope, at least.

How do I make it?

Making clarified butter is actually pretty easy, although it is easier if you are making a larger batch. All you need is butter – I used just one stick (as that’s all we had in the refrigerator).

First, I added the butter to a small saucepan and put it over low heat.

I let the butter melt.  See that foamy white stuff on top?  You want to get rid of that.

The extraction process is two-fold: I first skimmed off the white foam from the top with a spoon, then spooned out the clarified butter (the clear yellow part), leaving the solids on the bottom.

You can toss the white foam that you skim first and the remaining solids at the bottom of your saucepan after removing the butter. This process isn’t actually very difficult, as the foam rises easily and the solids settle nicely on the bottom. But like I mentioned earlier, it is easier if you’re doing a few sticks of butter, as you’ll get a thicker white foam to skim from the top.

Tips

• Just be careful skimming the foam and spooning out the butter – try to keep them as separated as possible.
• You’ll lose about a quarter of the volume of your butter, so I’ll probably only use clarified butter when it is really necessary.

Printable Recipe

Ingredients:

• Butter

Recipe:

1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over low heat. Skim the white from from the top. Ladle or spoon out the clear butter while leaving the milk solids in the saucepan. Discard the milk solids and foam.

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