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.

  • lnm225@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    smacks forehead

    That is a great idea! Coconut oil was ok,but kinda odd-flavored for popcorn …

    • acupofcoffee@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Since ghee is so expensive, I usually do coconut oil and ghee mixed!

      I love ghee on my stovetop popcorn! A wok works great!

      • blueskiesoc@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s a bot. I kept getting it too and there are identical ones for other teams.

        Here’s how I blocked it. Click on the community listed next to the (bot) username. Then on that page block the community. It should be on the upper part on the right close to where it says join the community.

        I had like three bot baseball communities that I blocked.

      • minimar@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s another websocket related bug that’s already been fixed! lemmy.world is currently out of date, however. If you want to get rid of it, either wait for Ruud to push the update, or switch instances.