For the Best Diner-Style Pancakes, I Aways Add a Tablespoon of This to the Pan

There are a lot of ways to make a batch of pancakes. You can make them extra fluffy or thin. You can add bananas, blueberries, or chocolate chips. You can swap in whole-wheat flour, or oatmeal. The most basic of pancakes, though, are a simple affair made with run-of-the-mill pantry ingredients — flour, sugar, milk, and, of course, butter for the griddle. I’ve been making pancakes my whole life, and I’ve never cooked them in anything other than butter. It gives the pancakes a perfect golden color and that buttery flavor that is, quite frankly, non-negotiable. I was surprised then, to find that there is, in fact, a better option for cooking pancakes: ghee.

Ghee is a version of clarified butter. Butter is made up of butterfat, milk solids, and water. If you slowly cook butter down, you can skim away the milk solids and water, and you’re left with clarified butter. Ghee is what you get when you cook the clarified butter just a little bit longer until it just starts to brown. It has a lovely, toasty buttery flavor, and — crucially for cooking — a much higher smoke point than regular butter. 

That higher smoke point makes ghee perfectly suited to cooking. Regular butter can require some fiddling with heat levels to ensure the pan doesn’t start to smoke and avoid the butter burning, which can impart an unpleasant flavor to food. Ghee, on the other hand, doesn’t suffer from those pitfalls. Because the milk solids have been removed, you can cook it for much longer, and at a higher heat without risk of burning or smoking. And the best part is, you don’t sacrifice that precious buttery flavor. 

• It’s a 1:1 swap. You can use the same amount of ghee as you would butter.
• You can make your own. While store-bought ghee is easy to find, it’s also pretty easy (and cheaper) to turn butter into ghee yourself.
• Try it with other dishes. Any time you are cooking something in butter, you can swap in ghee: scrambled eggs, sautéed mushrooms, home fries, the world is your oyster.

This post originally appeared on The Kitchn. See it there: I Never Cook Pancakes in Butter or Oil — I Aways Add A Tablespoon Of This to the Pan For Maximum Diner Vibes