The Importance of Cooking with Traditional Fats: Butter and Ghee

The Importance of Cooking with Traditional Fats: Butter and Ghee

In today’s vodcast, I chat about the importance of cooking with traditional fats with a focus on butter and ghee as they are often the easiest to first incorporate into your traditional foods kitchen.

Get to know more about these topics in the following blog post sections:

• Cooking with Traditional Fats: Butter
• Cooking with Traditional Fats: Ghee

These conversational vodcasts are available to the Kitchen Pioneers who have joined my YouTube membership community—The Traditional Foods Kitchen Academy.

Traditional Foods Kitchen Academy

My comprehensive vodcasts are exclusively available to members of the Traditional Foods Kitchen Academy, who we call Kitchen Pioneers. You can learn more about my optional YouTube membership community, including members-only videos and exclusive perks.

This membership community is optional. I’m still publishing my weekly detailed instructional cooking videos on my public YouTube channel that you can watch for free. (Thanks so much for being a Sweet Friend and subscriber!)

In addition to links to the latest Kitchen Academy vodcasts, this blog post lists some of the public videos that I talk about in my vodcast.

Cooking with Traditional Fats: Butter

When it comes to eliminating processed fats out of our pantries, the easiest replacement is butter. Who doesn’t love butter! Salted or unsalted, butter can’t be beat for topping toast, smearing on cooked veggies, and adding to baked goods.

Butter is a real fat and not processed in the way margarine and other vegetable oils are. So empty your pantry of those rancid fats, and start using butter.

Cooking with Traditional Fats: Ghee

When it comes to cooking with butter, you need to keep the smoke point in mind. What is a smoke point? It’s the temperature at which a fat should not be overheated to prevent it from becoming rancid.

Butter’s smoke point is 350°F. You can sauté with butter, but you need to be careful to make sure that you do not overheat it because you do not want to burn the milk solids present in the butter.

But what if you want to cook at a higher temperature and you want to use a traditional fat? Ghee or clarified butter comes to the rescue!

You can make your own ghee or clarified butter by melting butter in a saucepan. The oil part of the butter floats to the top, and the milk solids settle to the bottom. If you strain out those milk solids, you have plain clarified butter. If you allow those milk solids to sit on the bottom of the saucepan and toast up a bit, you have ghee.

Ghee is especially tasty and my preferred form of clarified butter. Since plain clarified butter and ghee both have a smoke point of 450°F, they’re perfect for high temp cooking!

More Butter videos

Want to learn how to make your own butter that’s also cultured with gut-loving good bacteria? I’ll show you how to make cultured butter with only two ingredients in the following recipe video.

When you make butter, you get REAL buttermilk as a byproduct. But if you don’t want to make your own butter, you can make buttermilk substitutes for all your baking and homemade salad dressing needs. In the following recipe video, I show you how to make four different buttermilk substitutes.

Now that you know how to make buttermilk, be sure to try making one of these homemade salad dressings!

More Cooking with Traditional Fats Videos

UPDATE: Here are the other videos in my Importance of Cooking with Traditional Fats series:

• Animal Fats
• Cooking Oils

More Kitchen Pioneer Videos

Catch up on some of the recent videos in our membership community:

• Traditional Foods Kitchen Academy video playlist (Optional Membership Community)

Remember that you’re always welcome to post questions and comments on my videos at any time, and I’m glad to reply.

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1. Subscribe to My YouTube Channel for Traditional Foods Videos (Free) - When you subscribe, be sure to click on the notification bell that will let you know each time I upload a new video.
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4. Order The Modern Pioneer Cookbook (Optional Paid) - Get a printed book of Mary's nourishing recipes from a Traditional Foods Kitchen. This bestselling cookbook is published by Penguin Random House with their DK imprint.

I look forward to having you join me in my Texas Hill Country Kitchen!

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Shop for items used in this blog post or video

Favorite Kitchen Supplies

• Chef’s Knife
• Bamboo Cutting Board
• Lodge Cast Iron Frying Pan
• Scanpan
• Spatula Spoon
• Whisk
• Large Stock Pot
• Stainless Steel Colander
• Large Measuring Cup
• Stainless Steel Measuring Cups and Spoons
• Baking Sheet
• 2-Cup Glass Storage Jars with Lids
• 10-Piece Glass Bowl Set
• Flour Sack Towels
• Fat Separator
• Favorite Aprons

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• Masontops Fermentation Kit (See promocode below)
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Use promo code MARYSNST for a one-time 15% off Masontops and Breadsmart products on Amazon.com.

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Amazon Shop and Shopping Guide

• Visit Mary’s Nest Amazon Shop
• Visit my Shopping Guide page
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