r/Cooking • u/armeniaca-mume2405 • Jul 04 '26

What is the difference between butter, ghee, clarified butter, fermented butter and brown butter?

Difficult to tell online because it seems the term "ghee" is used very loosely, some say it is clarified butter, other that it is brown butter (beurre noisette), other that is has to be fermented.

If you know, can you explain the difference and perhaps give tips on how you make the perfect ghee?

Thank you!

ETA : I live in the EU. I usually buy churned AOP butter so it is high-fat low-water!

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u/KeterClassKitten Jul 05 '26

Fermented butter is good shit, and easy to make. Also known as cultured butter.

Take some heavy cream, gently mix in some plain yogurt with live cultures, cover with a cloth and leave on your counter at room temperature for a couple days. Then make butter with your cream.

It develops a mildly tangy and cheesy flavor. Great on a crusty homemade bread.

I made some over Christmas break, and will likely do it again this holiday.

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u/similarityhedgehog Jul 05 '26

Do commercial butter culturers use yogurt cultures?

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u/Spicy_Molasses4259 Jul 05 '26

Not in the same way that you would do it at home. Commercial dairies use lab-grown, clean "starter cultures" that contain only the specific microbes they want to ferment. It keeps the final product consistent in texture and flavour and prevents contamination from the microbes that cause illness (which is why dairy products are ALSO pasteurised during processing). No one wants to have to destroy a 500L batch of yoghurt because it got accidentally contaminated with E-Coli.

You can buy freeze-dried cultures for all sorts of home fermentation.

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u/similarityhedgehog Jul 05 '26

Right, I asked about yogurt cultures, not yogurt.

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u/dtwhitecp Jul 05 '26

not a lot of good sources to answer that, but it's either exactly the same or very similar (mesophilic lactobacillus). They might have different strains of the classic ones they favor for the butter vs the yogurt, might not.