Question: Can you deep fry with butter?

Ignore for a moment whether you’d personally want to.  It just seems like something that would be trendy if possible.  Maybe pre-recession trendy, cause that much butter isn’t cheap, but trendy along high meets low comfort food lines. Or something up Paula Deen’s alley.

Answer:

Whether you can deep fry with a fat is dependent on the smoke point – above which an fat/oil becomes unusable.  According to Wikipedia and Google books version of What Einstein told his cook, deep frying requires fat at a temperature of 345–375 °F.  Without a lot of care, the temperature may reach 400 °F.

Regular butter, smoke point = 350 °F – no, too low
Your average clarified butter (butter w/ milk solids removed), smoke point = around 400 °F – tempting fate
Ghee (Indian clarified butter w/o any water), smoke point = 485 °F – deep fryable!

Other than cost, my best guess for why deep frying with ghee isn’t the rage is that a lot of the buttery taste is in the butter fat.  Ghee has a unique taste of its own though, would be interesting…

Also, in my research found the fantastic Cooking for Engineers website.  Worth checking out.

This book looks pretty interesting too: