Why YSK: Popcorn fans often want a buttery flavor, but plain butter is a bad choice for popping popcorn in a pot, because the proteins and sugars smoke and burn around the same temperature where it’s hot enough to pop the kernels.

Ghee, or Indian-style clarified butter, is butter that’s been simmered and the milk solids (proteins and sugars) skimmed off. This leaves a clear yellow oil that doesn’t smoke when it’s heated and doesn’t go rancid quickly, but has a distinct toasty butter flavor.

Vegetable oil is either flavorless or faintly bitter, and some high-temperature vegetable oils tend to start polymerizing (i.e. becoming plastic) when heated in small amounts. This is also not good for popcorn.

Good-quality popcorn popped in ghee reliably produces lots of “butterfly” popcorn with few unpopped “duds” and no scorched kernels or batches ruined by smoke.

Try it! I’m sure not going back to canola oil.

        • Neb@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          maybe. maybe the topic is more complex than that.

          Are cows raped for butter? always? is it the same degree of awfulness if a cow gets ‘raped’ in a industrial plant or if a cow gets mounted by a bull in a field? is ‘rape’ even a term that can be used to describe actions that are done to or by animals? Or should it be used for humans only? is it disrespectful to human victims of rape to use the same words to describe something that happened to an animal? Are cows slaughtered for butter? every cow that produced milk that was used to make butter? How many people could the death of a cow benefit before it becomes a morally correct thing to do? What is a cows life worth? Would stopping to breed cows and thus a collapsing overall world-population of cows be something good or something bad? Or is it in between somewhere? Who defines even what is morally correct and what isnt?

          Im not trying to be an asshole or anything (i know it seems like it here), but I dont think writing

          Cows are raped & slaughtered for butter ~~the more you know!~~

          with a slightly condescending undertone on a messageboard thread about popcorn is the smartest way to go about this

          • NotAPenguin@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            It’s all bad no matter how it happens and it’s completely unneeded, therefore it’s all unacceptable.

        • VoxAdActa@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I’ve had a lot of livestock, but I’ve never raised cattle before. Do cows give affirmative consent to bulls out in the field? Or in the wild? I know hens sure as fuck don’t, does (goats) don’t in any meaningful way, and mares… well, mares can be iffy about it, and it’s not always clear-cut. And then, of course, the tomcats straight up rape all day and all night, so it’s almost cheating to include them.

          How different are cows in that regard?