Rescues · TO CLARIFY
Clarified butter still burns.
Why it happens
Milk solids carried over. Skim the foam properly and leave the last of the sediment behind rather than pouring everything off.
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.