You melt butter, let it bubble until the water boils off, and strain out the milk solids. Clarified butter stops there; ghee simmers on until the solids toast to a nutty amber. What's left is nearly pure butterfat: about 60–65% saturated ¹. Gone are the lactose, the casein, and the water. The cholesterol stays, because it lives in the fat itself.

Two things actually change at the stove. Stripped of milk solids, the fat smokes around 250°C instead of 150°C, above extra-virgin olive oil and level with refined avocado oil. And with the dairy protein and sugar down to trace levels, most people who bloat or flare after butter tolerate ghee fine.

The math it doesn't dodge: one tablespoon carries about 9 g of saturated fat, half the daily ceiling for an adult at cardiovascular risk. Swap two tablespoons of olive oil for ghee every day and your LDL climbs roughly 10–15 mg/dL ². Small on one panel. But LDL exposure compounds, and twenty years of an extra 12 mg/dL is the kind of quiet dose that surfaces as plaque on a calcium scan in your fifties ³. The substitution is what decides the outcome: replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat cuts cardiovascular events by about a third ⁴. Trading the other way is a step backwards.

Ghee is a specialist, not a default. Reach for it when the job truly calls for it, and let olive oil handle everything else.

A jar runs $8–15 and lasts months. It's shelf-stable in a dark cupboard, since the water and protein that microbes need are gone; it smells like crayons when it finally turns. Making it yourself takes half an hour and no skill, and saves you a marked-up jar. Grass-fed and cultured labels cost three to five times more and nudge up vitamin K2, but the lipid math is unchanged.