Question about store bought ghee...

[spicy]

So, I just bought the giant tub of ghee from Costco. This is the first time i have bought ghee. I have made it myself in the past and it was delicious. In an effort to save time I failed to take into account that the premade stuff would not be nearly as good. Has anyone re-clarified store bought ghee to get it to that deliciously nutty flavor? This store bought ghee is very yellow and I'm missing the beautiful caramel color too! Any advice is much appreciated!

[ShannonM816]

When you make ghee, what you're doing is heating the butter until the milk solids separate (at that stage, when they first separate, you could strain it and have clarified butter), and then you're heating it a little more to make the milk solids brown and give them that flavor, and then you're straining the milk solids off. I don't think you could truly make it taste more like ghee because there's no more milk solids to brown further to get the nutty flavor. You could try, especially if you dislike the ghee enough that you may choose not to eat it anyway, since there'd be nothing to lose. If you have access to the Well Fed cookbooks, she has a recipe, I think it's called Better Butter, where she put spices into her ghee as it was cooking, before she strained it -- if you're going to remelt it, you try something like that to change the flavor.

Another idea would be to make it into something like a compound butter -- a butter that's got other ingredients combined into it to change the flavor -- but obviously, it would be compound ghee. Here's one recipe, but if you don't like the herbs he's used here, you can google compound butter for other ideas, or just use your own favorite herbs or spices. This will probably help if the ghee is just sort of bland or flavorless. If it actually has a bad taste to it, this may not cover that up.