When you look up most recipes from chefs and TV cooks, the recipes usually start with a combination of heating up butter and oil or ghee and oil. Both former fat sources are big on flavour and enrich a recipe with their unique mouthfeel. Neutral cooking oils, on the other hand, are cooking mediums that help in making flavours of ingredients more complex, without adding too much themselves. On being combined, the fat base in a recipe locks in the flavour of the butter or ghee and allows for searing and caramelising to happen at higher temperatures due to the oil.
Butter has three main components – fat, water and protein. Depending on the kind of processing it has undergone, butter usually contains 80-83% fat that is a homogenous mixture of many molecules. 15% of butter also contains moisture that solidifies when stored at low temperatures and begin to sizzle when heated. Besides milk sugars and minerals, butter is also made up of milk proteins that give butter its distinct flavour. When butter is heated in a pan, the water content evaporating causes it to get foamy and sizzle, leaving fat behind that is most likely to burn.
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Diluting the concentration of these fats with oil as well as swirling the fat around the pan, allows the moisture to evaporate at an even pace, allowing for the fat to gradually reach smoking point. Depending on the recipe in question, using just butter for dishes where the ingredients will only be cooking for a short span of time, is ideal. Whereas, using a mixture of butter and oil for pan-frying, searing, roasting and stir frying, works much better with context to flavour. When heat is applied to fat, the natural chemistry indicates that they will reach a smoking point, however – the real deal lies in how long it takes to get there.
Since most often, we opt for simply oil as a base for dishes, we’re most likely only to wait until it gets to optimum temperature, before the addition of other ingredients. Smoking points for fat in recipes are rarely reached, unless the technique of searing or roasting is being undertaken, to give vegetables or meat their brown colour on the outside. Using a mixture of oil and butter usually helps while cooking delicate vegetables or sea food, whereas using either of the options to cook tougher meats or hard vegetables is advised.