YSK: If you make popcorn in a pot on the stove, the oil to use is ghee.
YSK: If you make popcorn in a pot on the stove, the oil to use is ghee.
Why YSK: Popcorn fans often want a buttery flavor, but plain butter is a bad choice for popping popcorn in a pot, because the proteins and sugars smoke and burn around the same temperature where it's hot enough to pop the kernels.
Ghee, or Indian-style clarified butter, is butter that's been simmered and the milk solids (proteins and sugars) skimmed off. This leaves a clear yellow oil that doesn't smoke when it's heated and doesn't go rancid quickly, but has a distinct toasty butter flavor.
Vegetable oil is either flavorless or faintly bitter, and some high-temperature vegetable oils tend to start polymerizing (i.e. becoming plastic) when heated in small amounts. This is also not good for popcorn.
Good-quality popcorn popped in ghee reliably produces lots of "butterfly" popcorn with few unpopped "duds" and no scorched kernels or batches ruined by smoke.
Try it! I'm sure not going back to canola oil.
You're viewing a single thread.
wait how can it be indian butter I thought they don't exploit cows there
No, most Indians aren't vegan, just vegetarian. They just don't kill cows (and this isn't universal, some areas don't care).
But I thought Indians were a monolith
They just don't eat beef (except some locations), but they use a lot of dairy products.
They just leave them to suffer of malnutrition and disease in the streets. Good thing they don’t exploit them!