Rescues · TO CLARIFY
The butter browned during clarifying.
Why it happens
Too much heat. It should barely melt — browning here makes ghee, which is delicious and a different thing.
Recovering it
Cloudy clarified butter can be re-melted and settled again, which usually finishes the job. A stock that has re-clouded can be clarified a second time with a fresh raft, though each pass costs some flavour. Gritty liquid is simply strained again. Butter that browned is not a failure at all — it is browned butter, and worth keeping for something else rather than discarding.
The mechanism
Two quite different operations share the name. Clarifying butter means separating its three components — butter is roughly 80% fat, 16% water and 4% milk solids — by melting it gently so they stratify, then keeping only the fat. Those milk solids are proteins and sugars, and they are what burns at around 150°C, so removing them raises the usable temperature to well above 200°C. That is the entire reason to do it. Clarifying a stock is a different mechanism: fine particles stay suspended because they are too small to settle, so an egg-white raft is used to trap them — the albumen coagulates as the liquid warms and forms a mesh that catches the particles as it rises. Straining alone removes what is large; only the raft removes what is colloidal. For a starchy liquid like horchata, the job is simply mechanical filtration, done twice.
The full TO CLARIFY lesson — how to tell, where to practise it, what it carries to.