Ghee.....

[Tim Horton]

Has anyone any experience making or making and canning home made Ghee ?? 

I ran across a short video of someone melting butter in a plastic bag in a pot of boiling water.   Then doing a very rudimentary separating of the foam and milk fat solids from the liquid.  If the resulting product is useful to them, good and fine. 

However.......    The problem I had with there attempt was they were referring to this product as both clarified butter and Ghee...  

To the best of my knowledge, clarified butter is a first step in one or more processes it takes to end up with Ghee.   Sweetie has talked about we can make homemade clarified butter or Ghee and home can each.  For some reason I'm thinking one has a significant more stable and longer shelf life than the other.  Both products being useful in a number of ways.  

From the international section of the local grocery we have bought what is labeled as Ghee.  This is a product from India, that I feel is more toward the clarified butter end of the process.  None the less useful this product has been, but we are hoping we can make an as good or better home product. 

Experience, info, details ?? 

[feather]

Yes and no.
I have no experience because I liked butter with the milk fats part of it kept in the fat.
Ghee is butter without the milkfat part, so no water is left in it, which keeps it from spoiling. Water is the spoiler.
The issue of making ghee, has me a little confounded because when you heat oil up it oxidizes some of the fat, and that's not healthy for you, but it keeps well on the shelf. It's one or the other. If keeping it shelf stable is most important, then you go with ghee. If keeping it completely healthy is most important, don't use it.

So, if you do make it, don't overheat it, use the least amount of heat you can to get it shelf stable.

Best wishes no matter what you do. (coming from me, with 20 lbs of butter in the freezer wasting freezer space)

[Ozarks Tom]

We've canned butter, as well as cheese. Our butter has been on the shelf for about 6 years, and looks like the day we canned it. The key is turning it as it cools in the jars to keep it from separating.

[comfortablynumb]

I made lots of ghee bricks while the cow was still milking.

Once you make the butter, you melt it in a pot. Once its melted you jack the heat up a little bit so it simmers. After a short while you'll get some foam, you skim that off. In a short while, you'll see the oil go from cloudy to transparent (like corn oil) and the milk solids fall to the bottom like sand.

In short, you deep fry the solids out of the butter. Once its clears and the solids are all dark brown sand at the bottom, you strain it.... it'll go right thru a coffee filter.

They say its shelf stable like coconut oil... I poured all mine into brick shaped molds and put em in the deep freeze.

The longer you simmer it the darker it gets, if you like it with a toasty flavor.

[feather]

This is for information on safe canning. Your mileage may vary. There is good news at the end, if you make it all the way down there.

Butter is a dairy product and shouldn’t be canned. Milk and butter are “low acid foods”, this means they can support the outgrowth of C. botulinum and toxin formation in a sealed jar at room temperature. Unique fats in milk and butter (the dairy fats) can protect botulism spores from the heat of even a pressure canner. SO, if you buy butter from the store and there was one person at the dairy where that butter came from, that was not following cleanliness procedures, you could get sick from canning it. Botulism spores (commonly found in dirt) are not killed by the pasteurization process of milk so they can still be in there at any time. While undesired, this usually isn’t a big deal because if ingested they can pass through a healthy adult without causing any harm (or a resulting product recall). However, if you take that same dairy product containing the spores and put in a jar where you seal it off from oxygen for an extended period of time at room temperature…..it can grow undisturbed into one of the many strains of Clostridium botulinum, and produce an extremely lethal neurotoxin until you open it up and eat it. How lethal you may ask?
Botulinum Toxin
“Botulinum toxin is the most acutely toxic substances known, with a median lethal dose of about 1 ng/kg when introduced intravenously and 3 ng/kg when inhaled. This means, depending on the method of introduction into the body, a mere 90–270 nanograms of botulinum toxin could be enough to kill an average 90-kg (200-lb) person, and four kg of the toxin, if evenly distributed, would be more than enough to kill the entire human population of the world.….Botulinum toxin has been recognized and feared as a potential bioterror weapon.”
That lethal. Its odorless, tasteless and can have no visible appearance, and the lid to the jar will still have a nice seal. If ingested immediate medical attention and a dose of anti-toxin are usually required to prevent death and nerve damage. That’s why it’s such a big deal.
Food quality has improved AND medical response time has also improved that’s why you rarely hear of Botulism poisoning cases anymore. If you disregard this information, in a sense, you are trusting the same mega-farms that brought you the salmonella egg poisonings and following egg recall in 2010 to bring you perfectly clean milk and butter.
Some people take even more short cuts with butter and water bath can it – or worse, can it in their oven which guarantees that the temperatures won’t get high enough in the jar to kill the spores, increasing their risk. Dry heat from your oven is slow to penetrate into jars and the recommended time is not long enough for the center of the jar to get up to temperature, the only way you can be certain it got up to temp is to break the seal and check which is counterproductive to your efforts.
Water boils at 212° F near sea level and because of the heating curve even if you increase the temperature on your stove the water NEVER gets any hotter, so water bathing your butter also will not bring it up to a temperature where Clostridium botulinum can be killed (this is why water bath canning relies more on acidity than heat to sterilize food). Botulism spores are killed after being exposed to temperatures of 240˚ for a specific period of time, through scientific testing those “times” have been determined and are listed as “processing times” with each approved canning recipe.

*the good news* One way you CAN store butter for the long term is by ‘clarifying’ it first, when you ‘clarify’ butter you remove the dairy fats, making it more healthy and shelf-stable – this is also called ghee. Prepared this way you can store butter on the shelf without canning it for over a year.  
www.foodiewithfamily.com/homemade-ghee-how-and-why-you-should-make-it-and-what-it-is/ (much like what CN said)

[comfortablynumb]

Well you don't really "can" ghee.... once its rendered its shelf stable as is. You can put it in a clean mason jar and set it on the shelf.