Clarify Butter for Eggs Benedict

Video Transcript

"Hello! This is Chef Sean Roe on behalf of expertvillage.com. As I mentioned earlier, it’s not necessary to clarify your butter, though if you want to follow more of a French tradition, I’m here to show you how to clarify butter. It’s very similar to the to the same process as melting butter. Instead of the microwave, you are using a saucepan. You cut your butter into small chunks. Realize that you are going to get only about 80% of the product you put in; the other 20% you are going to skim off the surface. The point of clarifying butter is to keep the oils and discard of the solids. The solids are what burn; get overheated and turn black. When you clarify butter, you retain only the animal oils that comprise it and therefore you increase the smoking temperature, or the heat resistance of the product. When you clarify butter, you can bring it to a much higher temperature without burning it. So the process is rather slow. We have to take this butter; we have to put it on a very low heat for a very long time. If we boil it or overcook it, again, the solids will burn. Once that is accomplished, we will take a standard ladle to skim off the solids from the top, leaving only perfectly clear butter behind, and that’s what we can use for our hollandaise sauce. Again, this is not necessary, though we in the profession, like to use clarified butter because it has a lot of attributes, as appose to just melted butter. "