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.

  • Capt. Wolf@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Man, I could definitely go for regular coconut flavor on popcorn though! Toss in some dehydrated pineapple bits…

    • WetBeardHairs@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Oh that sounds great. If you want to get real fancy, toss in some coconut shreds and toasted walnut pieces. Dang I know what I’m doing for my next movie night. My popcorn popper hasn’t been used in a few months.