I don't think there is a culture of celebrating rancid ghee in India (maybe someone can correct me?), but if your ghee does go rancid - which I have had happen on occasion when the kitchen is unusually warm, or if I wasn't quite careful enough straining solids - you can simply think of it as Indian smen? A distinctive finishing flavor, no question. It is sometimes buried for months to develop its prized flavor. Smen is funky, technically rotten, and distinctive - accurately titled beurre ranci in French. Both butters are clarified, and both have been used in ceremonial, healing, and culinary ways for millennia. Although, as I think about it, in the Arab world, there is smen, another ancient dairy-based fat made, traditionally, from the milk of sheep and/or goat. There are few ingredients that have been as culturally significant for as long. Ghee is an ingredient deeply revered in India, most often made from the milk of the sacred cow. So(!), there you have a basic description, but ghee is so much more than this. The process for making clarified butter is similar to that of making ghee, ghee is simply cooked longer and has more contact with the browning milk solids, in turn lending a different flavor profile. This means ghee (and its cousin, clarified butter) is remarkably stable, even at higher temperatures. In short, this post is all about how to make ghee. For those of you who might be unfamiliar, ghee is an unsalted butter that has had the milk solids removed after separating from the butterfat, resulting in beautiful, golden, pure fat with an unusually high smoking point. Making ghee is a process I enjoy, and it yields a wonderful cooking mediums. I make homemade ghee from good butter every few weeks.
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