Clarified Butter

Butter is the single most important ingredient in cooking, ranking up there with eggs, salt, and flour. There. I said it. Now that it's out in the open, we can move on. Butter, while great to eat, is also great to saute with, but it has the disadvantage that its smoke point is relatively low --- i.e., one can not get it up to the necessary temperature without it burning. But, if one could remove the impurities from butter which cause it to smoke, we're in business. This brings us to...

Clarified butter. Drawn butter. Ghee. Many words for a relatively simple thing - purified butter. What we're basically doing is heating up butter to the point where its 3 components, milk solids, water, and milk fat separate out due to differences in density. The trick is to extract what we're after, the liquid milk fat.

Clarified butter - makes any amount you wish:

1. Heat butter over medium low heat until completely dissolved.

2. When butter is completely dissolved, you should have something looking like the above but without the two sticks of butter. The milk solids exist as foam on the top and as amoeba looking things on the bottom. Skim off as much of the foam from the top as you can. You get this:

3. Now, slowly pour the mixture into some type of heat proof tupperware, taking care to not bring any of the milk solids with you (take it through some cheesecloth for some very nice clarified butter).

4. Done. Use immediately or freeze in an airtight container indefinitely. 

Uses: lobster, crab, sauteing, hollandaise sauce, many, many others. I don't know. Look it up. Shoot.