Clarified butter starts out as regular butter. You cook it gently, let the water evaporate, and skim off the milk solids or let them settle to the bottom. What you’re left with is pure butterfat—golden, flavorful, and incredibly useful.

It’s essential in traditional Middle Eastern and South Asian dishes where regular butter would mess with traditional textures and flavors. It’s also shelf stable and has a high smoke point.

If you’re ready to learn how to clarify butter (without any straining!), jump to the recipe + video. Or if you want to read a bit more about why clarified butter is so great, along with some ideas of how to use it, continue onward.

a measuring cup of golden clarified butter

What is clarified butter?

Regular butter is made of three components: fat, milk solids, and water. When you melt butter slowly, the water steams off, and the milk solids sink or float. Skim and/or strain, and voilà!

Why use clarified butter?

1. Better texture in baked goods

Clarified butter helps you avoid gluten development in delicate pastries. That doesn’t mean that if you bake with it, your pastries will magically become gluten free. But aesthetically speaking, they will not be as chewy, tough, and/or stretchy. Things instead become shatteringly crisp, as with ghraybeh and baklava. This is the only way to get the right texture in certain baked goods.

2. An authentic flavor and look

Removing the milk solids prevents browning, which might sound like a loss. But in many traditional pastries, a pale golden finish is actually the goal. For chocolate chip cookies? Oh, I’m using the un-clarified stuff, no doubt. But for Middle Eastern and South Asian treats? It’s clarified butter all the way.

3. It lasts longer and cooks hotter

Without milk solids, clarified butter won’t burn as easily—it has a much higher smoke point than regular butter, making it ideal for sautéing and frying.

It also keeps for months at cool room temperature in a clean, sealed container, away from the light. Discard if it starts smelling rancid at any point.

ways to use it

Check out the archives for a full list of ways to use it, or check out some of my favorites below:

How to Make Clarified Butter (no straining)

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Ingredients

227 grams (8 ounces / 2 sticks) unsalted butter

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Instructions

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Once the butter has melted, reduce the heat to medium-low and continue to simmer. Keep an eye on the temperature and adjust it as necessary, so that the butter solids don’t brown, and so that it doesn’t boil out of control. Within the first couple minutes, the white solids will separate from the yellow liquid (they will float to the top, and then some of them will sink to the bottom).
Remove from heat as soon as the simmering has quieted down a bit, but before it goes silent—this should take about 7 minutes. Use a spoon to carefully skim off any curdled solids from the surface, and then slowly pour the liquid into a measuring cup, leaving behind any of the solids left at the bottom of the pot.

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Notes

If you start with European butter, you will end up with between 175 and 180 grams of clarified butter. If you use American butter, you will end up with a bit less. If you have trouble clarifying it by skimming and pouring it off, you can use a fine mesh strainer to filter out the milk solids instead (but it needs to be extremely fine, or they’ll go right through). Very well-clarified butter should keep for 2 to 3 months at cool room temperature, or up to a year in the refrigerator. If you want to make sure you remove every last little bit of milk solids, simply unmold the chilled butter, and scrape away the last couple solids that sunk to the bottom. Just like with sweet cream butter, if it ever starts to smell rancid, discard it (but it should last much longer than butter that hasn’t been clarified). Oh and don’t throw away the milk solids! They’re delicious on toast.

This recipe was originally on 6 August 2018. I have not updated the recipe, but reposted it with a more user-friendly introduction to clarified butter.