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.

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.

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.

  • Takina's Old Pair™@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Is this a protip to make popcorn more enjoyable when Reddit goes to shit on the 1st of July? 😅

    So store bought ready to pop microwaveable “buttered” popcorn is not with ghee, right?

    • ohmyiv@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      No, it’s not made with ghee. Microwave popcorn “butter” is typically artificially flavored oil.