Ghee, or Indian-style clarified butter, is butter that’s been simmered and the milk solids (proteins and sugars) skimmed off. This leaves a clear yellow oil that doesn’t smoke when it’s heated and doesn’t go rancid quickly, but has a distinct toasty butter flavor.
Popcorn fans often want a buttery flavor, but plain butter is a bad choice for popping popcorn in a pot, because the proteins and sugars smoke and burn around the same temperature where it’s hot enough to pop the kernels.
Vegetable oil is either flavorless or faintly bitter, and some high-temperature vegetable oils tend to start polymerizing (i.e. becoming plastic) when heated in small amounts. This is also not good for popcorn.
Good-quality popcorn popped in ghee reliably produces lots of “butterfly” popcorn with few unpopped “duds” and no scorched kernels or batches ruined by smoke.
Try it! I’m sure not going back to canola oil.
I’ve had a lot of livestock, but I’ve never raised cattle before. Do cows give affirmative consent to bulls out in the field? Or in the wild? I know hens sure as fuck don’t, does (goats) don’t in any meaningful way, and mares… well, mares can be iffy about it, and it’s not always clear-cut. And then, of course, the tomcats straight up rape all day and all night, so it’s almost cheating to include them.
How different are cows in that regard?