3 Kitchen staples I make from “scratch”

We do our best to eat healthy whole foods and avoid processed, hyper-palatable junk in our house, (although we do go hard on some snacks every once in a while - hello, PB+J bites from Aldi!) and that often means that sourcing ingredients can get rather pricey if we buy them directly from the store. Luckily, with a little bit of effort (even less so if you enjoy the process of being in the kitchen) you can make these ingredients at home and oftentimes they'll be even more nutrient dense, and cheaper than the store bought stuff!

Here are 3 amazing kitchen staples you can make right in your own kitchen, just like a regular 0l’ Gordon Ramsey! ⬇️

Ghee

Ghee or clarified butter 🧈 is the fat or oil part of the butter, without the milk solids. We use ghee as a butter alternative at our house because both Megan and I are sensitive to dairy. Since the milk solids – the sugars like lactose and proteins like whey and casein most people have issues with, are taken out of ghee many people with mild dairy allergies (yours truly) or sensitivities can tolerate ghee wonderfully. Ghee carries a similar flavor as butter and is solid at low temperatures and liquid when warm. We use it anywhere you might use butter, to fry eggs, in baking, sauteing vegetables or searing chicken. 

Ghee usually comes in a jar and can be found in the oil section next to the coconut, olive, avocado and other various fats used for making food delicious. At grocery stores around here you can find it for anywhere from $7-15 a jar. At our Aldi yesterday a jar of ghee was $8.79 for a 13 oz jar.

…but ghee is made from butter, and you can get a pound of butter (16oz) for $3.55. That means that you can buy 2lbs of butter for the same price as a single jar of ghee! And if you know how to turn that butter into ghee, you can be a much more economical shopper 💰, getting about a jar and a half of ghee out of two pounds of butter! 

It couldn't be more simple – here's how I do it! ⬇️

Add your 2 lbs of butter to a baking safe dish (i usually use a cast iron skillet) and bake it at 250 fahrenheit for 75 minutes, that will get it to a light simmer which will dissolve any water that might be left in the butter as well as separate the fat from the milk solids. When you pull the melted butter from the oven there will probably be some foamy stuff on top, you can spoon that off the surface and save it or discard it (we save everything from this process to feed back to the chickens ♻️🐔). The milk solids will be at the bottom of the pan, from here you have a couple of choices. You can pour everything through a couple layers of cheesecloth which will catch the solids, or you can slowly, like VERY, VERY slowly pour your oil out into a spouted container while the solids stay settled at the bottom. I usually do the second one out of sheer laziness. From there you just need a glass jar to store your ghee and you're good to go! We keep ours in the spice cupboard next to the stove, but if it will take you a while to get through that much ghee you can use the fridge! 

Tallow

Tallow is rendered beef fat, the delicious fat that makes your ribeyes delectable and keeps your ground beef from drying out. Traditionally speaking tallow is rendered suet, the internal fat that surrounds the organs of the cow, but it can also be made from trimmings that a butcher will carve away from traditional cuts like a brisket or t-bone steak.

Rendering tallow can be more or less advanced than making ghee, depending on how free of impurities you want it. For things like tallow-based moisturizers or hand creams, you'll want pure white tallow, but if you're just using it as a cooking fat it's not super necessary. 

The first step is procuring a significant amount of fat, either backfat (trimmings) or suet. Many grocery stores don’t carry suet, but making friends with a direct-to-consumer beef producer usually does the trick; a farmers market is a great place to look. Grocery store butchers can usually get you trimmings. Next you’ll cut the fat into small chunks and throw it into an oven safe dutch oven pot.

You can cook it down on the stovetop (medium heat stirring frequently) or in the oven at 225 for a while, probably at least 3-5 hours (stirring every 30-45 minutes). The fat will render down and create a golden liquid. Continue cooking it down until the fat is no longer shrinking and begins to crisp up (again, we feed these “cracklin’s” to the chickens). 

If you're not worried about impurities, your next step is to simply filter out the chunks through a fine mesh sieve or cheesecloth and put your tallow into storage jars. The tallow will turn white and harden at room temperature.

If you want pure white tallow with fewer impurities (I have yet to have NO impurities), you can do an additional water filtration step. For this step, you'll fill a stainless steel bowl partially with warm water, pour your sieve filtered, warm fat into the water and put it in the fridge. When the fat hardens due to the cold temps, you'll be able to separate it from the water layer beneath it (fat floats on water) and on the bottom side of the hardened fat will be a layer of brown impurities. Scrape the bottom side with a knife and discard the impurities. From there simply melt back down your hardened fat and put it into storage jars. 

You can do this water step as many times as you find necessary to continue purifying your tallow, twice is about the right amount of time and effort for me to get 98% pure tallow. 

We use tallow for searing steaks, frying hash browns, sauteing vegetables, and adding to rice for a bit of extra fatty savoriness.

Bone Broth 

Bone broth is an amazing way to extract tons of flavor and nutrition out of the parts of the animal we would normally throw away. By boiling down the non-meat scraps and bones we can turn those parts into a delicious and nutritious broth that can be used for soups, sipping, and using in other recipes. Bone broths are a integral part of many traditional and indigenous cultures because they realized that extracting these essential nutrients from scraps was a great way to get the most from their food, especially when food was less abundant in the winter months and during times of famine. 

Bone broth has amazingly high levels of collagen that can be readily absorbed by the body, as well as vitamins and minerals. If cooked well, when cooled it will be a jello like consistency due to the high gelatin content (gelatin is a component of collagen) unlike store bought broths that are cooked for much shorter amounts of time and thinned down with water. 

Bone broth couldn’t be easier to make, simply take your trimmings and bones, roast them in the oven, i usually do 375 for 30-45 minutes until everything looks like it has some “char-acter”, then dump that into a crockpot or pot and cover with water to simmer for 12 to 48 hours, depending on how big your batch is and how flavorful you want it. You can also add vegetable scraps as well like carrot ends, onion skins, celery tops, or whatever else you think might marry together to create good flavor. Once it’s done cooking, strain everything and add some salt to taste. From there it’s ready to be distributed and used! 

PRO TIP: if youre planning on freezing any broth in glass jars 🫙, leave a half-inch to an inch below the “shoulder” (where it begins to taper and narrow toward the mouth) of the jar for expansion upon freezing, if you pour too close to the shoulder and freeze, the jars have a much higher likelihood of cracking or shattering due to expansion. Another pro tip, if you’re wanting an extra collagen boost for your broth, add some chicken feet 😟 (like $3-4 bucks at Whole Foods) to your broth!

So there you have it, my 3 favorite recipes to make ingredients for other recipes! These culinary explorations are just that, fun experiments to try and see if its worth it for you and your household, or if sticking to the store bought alternatives is the way to go. Have fun with them and let me know what you try!\