What you'll need:
-16 oz or more unsalted butter
-a small pot or sauce pan
-a spoon or baster for skimming (I use a spoon)
-a discard bowl for the solids
-a colander, slotted spoon or sieve
-a bit of cheesecloth
-a bowl or jar large enough to hold your freshly clarified butter. It will be HOT.
Optional but maybe super helpful:
-a large-ish heat-proof funnel
-a buddy
Begin with 16 oz (make more if you like, we blast through this in a week) of pure, unsalted butter. I prefer Kerrygold because it is from pastured cows. The Omega 3/Omega 6 ratio will be of the correct balance from grass-fed ruminants, not true of products from animals who's diets are comprised of grain. Kerrygold is sold in 8 oz bricks so you will need to purchase two. It is a bit more expensive than non-grassfed butter, but not by much. I have found it priced most competitively at Trader Joe's.
Put the butter into a small pot and begin heating the cold butter over medium heat. It will begin to melt slowly and it helps to occasionally stir and push the unmelted chunks around a little to distribute the heat.
After a couple of minutes the butter should be entirely liquid and at some point small white globs will begin to pop to the surface. This is the action of the milk solids separating from the fat and water.
Keeping the burner at a medium heat so as not to cause a sudden boil over, continue heating while the milk solids go kind of nuts. Shortly there will be a large amount visible.
Somewhere around this point use a spoon to gather the solids to one side and skim them off into your awaiting discard bowl.
Keep this up for a while. The solids will continue to separate and the entire surface will be white and frothy. I keep the burner at medium but will control the intensity of the boil by raising the pot off of the burner slightly if necessary. Keep skimming.
After a few minutes of this the solids will slow and the surface will appear buttery again. Now you are winning. Keep skimming.
It is impossible not to remove some of the butter liquid when skimming the solids. Don't fret too much when it happens but try to keep it to a minimum. Chalk it up to the cost of awesomeness.
Your determination and hard work is paying off. You'll arrive at a place where it seems almost impossible to skim any more of the junk. You'll want to, and you'll likely keep trying. But what's left on the surface just won't clump you'll begin to wonder if you know what you're doing at all. Perhaps you were wrong to try this, you should have just eaten the butter the way it was. Be happy now, this is a good thing.
Let it boil along, paying attention to the sound it's making and the variation in size of the bubbles. Many of them will be larger, with a few smaller ones. This is the remaining water separating and boiling out. We want this.
After a couple of minutes, all the water will boil out and you will notice two things. First, that the sound has changed. It is now more like a muted soft sizzle, almost as if the butter is whispering, "I'm ready now."
Second, that the big bubbles have ceased and there are only small, uniform bubbles. "I'm ready now."
Ready your filtering set-up, be it the sieve, colander or slotted spoon. I typically employ the colander method, but decided to get a little crazy, per popular modern vocalist Seal's suggestion, and went with the slotted spoon. Line your device of choice with some folded cheesecloth and hold it over your heat-proof bowl or jar.
Carefully but quickly pour the hot butter through the cheesecloth sieve thingy. You'll definitely want to make sure you are holding your sieve thingy over the bowl or jar. If using a mason jar or similar container, a large funnel will come in very handy. The funnel goes under the sieve thingy. Keep in mind, this stuff is HOT.
Here is a picture of clarified butter. If yours doesn't look pretty much just like this you somehow screwed it up. I feel that these instructions are very detailed and complete, and I even included step-by-step pictures so if you blew it then maybe cooking isn't your thing? I'm joking, I'm sure it turned out great. I've actually messed it up once or twice, usually just by letting it simmer too long after it reached the, "I'm ready now." stage. Worst case scenario would be that you have created Beurre Noisette, or traditional Ghee. Still awesome.
Place you container of freshly clarified butter in the refrigerator until it cools. After it is cool and has solidified, cover the container.
I hope this is helpful! Trial and error has resulted in a system that works well every time for me, so by sharing I hope you will be encouraged and inspired to try it. The experience of cooking with clarified butter is wonderful! It is more stable, doesn't smoke at the temperatures regular butter does, and you can eat as much of it as you want, remember it is healthy saturated fat!
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