How to Make Ghee at Home
Martina Slajerova- Ready in 15m
- 0 g net carbs
- 127 kcal
- Serves 14
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I love ghee! Ghee is clarified butter that has no casein or lactose. It still tastes quite close to butter and is great for cooking. Why make ghee? You don't need to be an orthodox paleo eater or suffer from food allergies to make your own ghee at home.
Compared to butter, ghee doesn't burn at high temperatures. You can also store it at room temperature and infuse it with ingredients like garlic, onion or any herbs. The options are endless!
And best of all, there are no carbs in infused ghee but you still get all the flavour in just a tablespoon of pure fat!
Apart from the inhgredients, you'll need:
- small pouring pan
- small Pyrex glass jar
- cheesecloth for filtering the liquid
- sieve with smallest holes possible
- small glass container (~ 200 ml/ 7 fl oz)
Be creative, try infusing ghee with vanilla beans, cinnamon or natural almond extract and use for making low-carb pancakes!
Step-by-step
To make garlic-infused ghee, slice the garlic.
Place the butter into a pan and start warming up on low heat. Slowly let it melt. Even if you use salted butter, all the salt will separate from the fat and your ghee will not be affected.
Add the sliced garlic and let it simmer. As the butter melts, pure fat will separate from the milk solids and water. Keep shimmering on low heat. The water will start to evaporate as soon as you see bubbles on the surface, followed by white foam.
About 10 minutes after the butter melts, the milk solids (mostly lactose) will eventually stick to the sides and bottom of the pan and will turn light golden. Be careful not to burn the ghee! Once the milk solids turn golden, it only takes a minute.
Take off the heat. Put a sieve on the top of the heat-resistant jug. Place the cheesecloth in a double layer onto the sieve and pour the ghee carefully through the cheesecloth.
Discard the milk solids trapped in the cheesecloth and anything left in the pan.
You should end up with about 80% of the volume of the butter.
Pour the ghee in a glass jar.
After it cools down, you can either keep it refrigerated or at a room temperature. After a few hours, the ghee will naturally solidify. Ghee can be stored at room temperature for several months. Store-bought ghee does not need to be refrigerated. Homemade ghee can also be stored at room temperature as long as there are no milk solids left.
Recipe
How to Make Ghee at Home
★★★★★4.8Quick and easy way to make flavored ghee at home. The ultimate ingredient for your ketogenic cooking!
- Hands on
- 15m
- Overall
- 15m
- Servings
- 14
- 0 g
- Net carbs
- 0 g
- Protein
- 14 g
- Fat
- 127
- kcal
Ingredients makes about 200 ml/ 6.8 fl oz
Instructions
To make garlic-infused ghee, slice the garlic.
Place the butter into a pan and start warming up on low heat. Slowly let it melt. Even if you use salted butter, all the salt will separate from the fat and your ghee will not be affected.
Add the sliced garlic and let it simmer. As the butter melts, pure fat will separate from the milk solids and water. Keep shimmering on low heat. The water will start to evaporate as soon as you see bubbles on the surface, followed by white foam.
About 10 minutes after the butter melts, the milk solids (mostly lactose) will eventually stick to the sides and bottom of the pan and will turn light golden. Be careful not to burn the ghee! Once the milk solids turn golden, it only takes a minute.
Take off the heat. Put a sieve on the top of the heat-resistant jug. Place the cheesecloth in a double layer onto the sieve and pour the ghee carefully through the cheesecloth.
Discard the milk solids trapped in the cheesecloth and anything left in the pan.
You should end up with about 80% of the volume of the butter.
Pour the ghee in a glass jar.
After it cools down, you can either keep it refrigerated or at a room temperature. After a few hours, the ghee will naturally solidify. Ghee can be stored at room temperature for several months. Store-bought ghee does not need to be refrigerated. Homemade ghee can also be stored at room temperature as long as there are no milk solids left.
Nutrition per 1 tbsp/ 15 ml
Carbs 0%Protein 0%Fat 100% of calories
- Net carbs
- 0 g
- Total carbs
- 0 g
- Fiber
- 0 g
- Sugars
- 0 g
- Protein
- 0 g
- Fat
- 14 g
- Saturated fat
- 8.4 g
- Calories
- 127 kcal
- Sodium
- 2 mg · 0.07% RDA
- Magnesium
- 0 mg · 0.07% RDA
- Potassium
- 3 mg · 0.17% EMR
Nutrition by ingredient
| Per 1 tbsp/ 15 ml | Net carbs | Protein | Fat | kcal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Butter, unsalted - used to make ghee | 0 g | 0 g | 14 g | 127 |
| Total | 0 g | 0 g | 14 g | 127 |
Serving size 1 tbsp/ 15 ml
- Gluten free
- Dairy free
- Egg free
- Nut free
- Nightshade free
- Pork free
- Avocado free
- Coconut free
- Fish free
- Shellfish free
- Beef free
- Pescatarian
- Low FODMAP
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Comments & ratings (30)
I've been staying away from infused oils/fat for a while now because I was unsure of how they fit into my carb count. Really nice to finally have an answer! Can't wait to start infusing. 😊
Any suggestions how to infuse ghee with 100% pure hing resin (not powder)?
Thanks.
So, it's basically butter oil/re-solidified butter with some sort of flavoring to it? Can get that for cheap here in German supermarkets.
And your point is?? We all know that but that's not what this is about 😊 Besides grass-fed ghee is not as cheap as you think. It's cheaper to make it at home.
I use Kerrygold pure Irish butter. Guess I will try and make ghee to remove the milk/cream. Hope it works!
I tried making one. Still had some solids. Read the article below and some helpful hints. Awesome. I also like the top pictures. Helps a lot. My first batch was not useless. I use it. Will try infused garlic...
I tried making ghee, but for some reason I couldn't get rid of all the solids and there was left a few millimeters thick layer of white stuff on the bottom of the jar. Can you always get rid of of all the solids easily? Perhanps this happened because I didn't have actual cheesecloth and used some sort of polyesther cloth instead. Maybe that material is the reason why some of the solids ran through it even after several attemps of trying to clarify the butter.
Yes, you do need cheesecloth - maybe it wasn't dense enough and that's why it didn't catch all the solids. If I don't have any cheesecloth, I use a layer of paper towel and it works just fine - nothing goes through.
Hey there. I use kerrygold pure irish butter and there are no milk fats to skim off. U can eat it like cheese. Try it.
Hi,
The layer of solids at the bottom is perfectly fine. Source: My Indian mother used to make ghee like that all the time at home growing up. Ghee looks like that, clear stuff at the top and solid white granular stuff at the bottom.
The problem is that the solids could get rancid if you leave it at room temperature.
Hi, Where would I find nice jars to store? Thank you
Hi Juliet, I'd think Amazon? I can't remember where I got these from 😊
was looking for this kind of easy recipe for Ghee prep...Thanks a lot for sharing... M definetly going to try this today
Always! 😊
i have been saving and using rendered chicken fat to grease my griddle and pan when searing.. I've seen the TV cooks use goose fat in dishes. Is it too weird to ask if Ghee from chicken/turkey fat will be fine and has anyone else done such?
Hi Marsha, all can be used for cooking. Ghee is only made from butter - it's dairy fat. Goose fat or duck fat are great for greasing / cooking too just like ghee but they are made from the tissue / fat layer.
Can I use ghee in place of butter as far as conversion rates go? Say if I wanted to use ghee in baking versus using butter? Tablespoon to tablespoon?
And how about the nutritional information? Is it the same as butter?
Butter has about 80% fat and ghee is 100% fat. This means that you may need to use more butter for the same results and avoid using butter for high-heat cooking. There is about 15 grams of fat in a tablespoon of ghee and 12 grams of fat in a tablespoon of butter. This makes ghee slightly higher in calories (there is some water and lactose) Hope this helps 😊
Hi, you say there is some water and lactose : in butter or in ghee ? Thank you.
Hi Adel, there is some water, lactose, casein, etc. in butter. Ghee is pure fat unless it's not strained well.
How long can you store it?
Hi Darlene, you can store it up to 12 months but I usually finish is in a few weeks or a month 😊
This sounds delicious, but isn't there a concern for botulism in garlic-infused oils? Or is that only for olive oil?
Thank you for your comment! I don't think there is. I'm not storing garlic or herbs in the oil but discard it straight away after infusing it. I think this only applies to garlic or herbs stored in oil to infuse it slowly. However, this is only my opinion and I would suggest you ask a specialist.
I'm not a food scientist but believe it is still a risk. It's likely that botulinum spores in the garlic will be transferred to the fat during the process.
See https://extension.umaine.edu/publications/4385e/
Ah cool - I use ghee almost exclusively in cooking, never bothered to try making it though, just assumed I'd lose most of my butter, but you reckon it yields ~75%?
Will try this garlic infused version when current ghee tub runs out (I go through a tub a week).
For cooking I use ghee, bacon grease, lard and coconut oil, but ghee is the #1 for me 😊
I used a 250 g package and it made the two small jars (on the photo), each of them is 100 ml, so it made about 75-80% ghee. It depends on the quality of the butter, water content, etc. Good butter should have 80-90% fat.
This is a great read. I'll be trying this concoction this weekend. Thanks for this!
Thank you! I was even thinking of trying dried mushrooms to "infuse" ghee... 😊