While I was peeling dried strawberries off of dehydrator sheets a couple weeks ago, Mike decided to try making clarified butter – “ghee”.

For years I’ve thought, why make ghee when we are blessed with an abundance of butter? Well, the answer to that question came as we began to run low on our coconut oil. Could there be a way to make our own healthy oil?

We go through a 5 gallon bucket of coconut oil every year. We’ve read alot about its anti-fungal, anti-bacterial and anti-viral traits, so we try to use and eat it as much as we can. 🙂

This year we went to order our annual bucket of coconut oil, but hadn’t heard back from our source. So as it got lower & lower, Mike started asking me questions about ghee. Begrudgingly, I began to research it, and was pleasantly surprised at what I found. My main concern was about pie crusts – could you use ghee to make a pie crust?? Yep! Once I read that, I knew this would be a worthwhile venture, lol! 🙂

Mike made it look pretty easy… The whole procedure took about 30 minutes. Started with 2 pounds of unsalted butter that he had made that day. Melted it in a tall stock pot on “4” (medium low). Didn’t stir it – just gently moved the foam a bit to peak at the clarity every 10 minutes or so. Eventually the foam cleared away, and you could see how the muddy yellow liquid changed to a beautiful, clear yellow. Dumped it through a muslin lined colander into a glass bowl, and that’s it! Yield was a smidge over 24 oz. or 3 cups of ghee from 2 lbs. of butter. 🙂

That 3 cups only lasted one week, lol! Worked perfect in our baked brown rice, for frying up our homemade salami, in our sourdough tortillas and crackers, in a cake recipe, for greasing my baking stones, and for frying our eggs in, too! Oh yeah. I am a ghee girl now… 🙂

Haven’t had time to try a pie crust yet – so perhaps that’ll be a future post. 🙂

We did finally get our 5 gallon bucket of coconut oil, so now my goal is to see if we can stretch it for two years instead of one… So exciting to find another product we can make ourselves to lessen the amount of money we need to spend off-farm! 🙂

2 days ago, I had my first try at making ghee, and it was a success! I clarified 6 pounds of unsalted butter & got 2.5 quarts of ghee. I put one quart in the fridge, and leave the rest in a kitchen cupboard. When I get around to making that pie – I’ll use the semi solid form from the fridge…