Skip to main content
Main

Clarified Butter

Clarified butter is butter melted with salt and white pepper, strained to remove solids.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and white pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 28% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,814 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Clarified Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a cup or small saucepan, combine the butter, salt, and white pepper.

  2. Place the saucepan in a pan of hot water over low heat to melt the butter slowly.

Serve

  1. Once melted, carefully pour the butter into a sauceboat, avoiding the sediment at the bottom.

  2. Serve immediately.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + white peppertop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides the fat that carries flavor and forms the smooth sauce once melted.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the butter so it tastes savoury throughout.

The step that matters

Pouring off the butter without the sediment. Butter is water, fat and milk solids. Slow melting lets the milk solids settle at the bottom, and pouring carefully from the top leaves them behind, giving a clear, smooth result.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes