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.
None of them are ghee. They’re all interesterified vegetable fat/ oils with ghee flavour added calling themselves “vegan ghee” to con the gulllible.
There’s no harm in being vegan, but it is foolish to fall for unhealthy products because they brand themelves as vegan/ vegetable-based.
Stick to vegetable oils but ffs don’t call them ghee.
Interesterified oils increase heart-disease risk by lowering HDL (good) cholesterol and raising LDL (bad) cholesterol, (like trans fats do). And they increase the risk of type 2 diabetes by raising fasting blood-glucose levels and decreasing insulin response. They also increase liver cellular stress markers.
Look up the effects of interesterified vegetable fat/ oils on a search engine of your choice and then read their labels before recommending them.
@xuxebiko
I’m no expert in these matters. But I can’t imagine ghee (clarified butter) being very healthy either in large quantities. If you are vegan (which I’m not) this a way to taste the op’s popcorn suggestion. I get the feeling you already had an opinion on the whole ghee/fake vegan ghee thing. And al I can say is, in the Indian cuisine, with a relatively large vegan population, fake ghee is a thing. Not some hipster hype.
This was about taste and cooking. Not about health.
@fubo
India does not have a ‘large vegan populatiion’, it has a large ‘vegetarian’ population with milk, yoghurt (we call it curd/ dahi), paneer (cottage cheese), and ghee a part of the daily diet. Vegetable fat/ oils used in cooking instead of ghee are usually either raw or filtered or refined. Interestified vegetable oil/ fat is a relatively new product and is used by FMCG co.s as a replacement for palm oil in their products. Interestified vegetable oil also tastes nothing like ghee. Don’t take my word for it, try it out yourself.
Any Indian touting vegan ghee will get laughed out of their home and get told to use the real thing.