101 Things To Do Before Next Thursday: Number 2
101 TTDBNT: Number 2 - Use ghee in your cooking
I have known about ghee for almost all of my life. It appears along with tigers and pancakes in a controversial story by Helen Bannerman which was read to me many times in my days at primary school in the late 1950s. If you aren't familiar with the dodgy tale you can find more here. There are expensive early editions for sale at my favourite second-hand bookshop in Alnwick, Northumberland. I look at my own cheaper copy now and again with confused nostalgia.
Forty years on, as my love for cooking developed and expanded, there was much fretting over the best oils and fats to use for particular recipes. In the ten years since then I have explored the potential of clarified butter or ghee as alternatives. I have made my own ghee just once. It worked well but I must admit an attachment to the particular brand which I have pictured. Seeds, olives and nuts all bring their differing flavours and heat tolerances to the mix of available oils but ghee is the stuff which cuts it best in my stir fry and curry dishes. It will cope with higher temperatures and leaves a lovely, glistening slick of fat across the surface of a sauce.
I hope I've made it clear that ghee is to be used in the right situation and not substituted for all the other oils and fats. As long as it's used occasionally and not ignored.
Oh, I also love the Thomas Keller approach to cooking lobster using Beurre Monté. That's another treatment of butter and I'll just mention it in passing here. No need for a separate page on this. Heck, I don't cook lobster that much.
Oof... maybe cooking more lobster will be another TTDBNT. Let's wait and see.