Ghee (butter oil) is easy to make. Slowly Heat up all the butter you want (in a pan, the oven works too) and skin off the water soluable goodies that float on the top. Eat this asap and store the ghee for cooking. Its great for frying because it doesn't burn as fast. More detailed recipes and refinements are to be found in almost any Indian cookbook.

I heard that you get a yield of butter oil from butter in a ratio of 12:1, so 12 times as much.

But it is milk produced by cows fed exclusively on fast growing grass, so that ratio might go up in winter.

EDITED TO ADD: I have been using butter oil for a little while now and have noticed a big difference in my skin and teeth. I eat an awful lot of pastured butter too, I was born not an hour from where the Kerrygold cows are pastured! So I have been eating pastured butter all along and I have to say that butter oil is better. It is expensive but is the best way to get extra K2 if you don't eat much offal.

"If you buy USDA certified then you are sure about what you are buying"

The USDA represents the "free market" big food cartels. They are NOT regulators and don't protect consumers but only protect profit. Don't trust one thing they say or certify. Justs go with principled suppliers (as a general rule for anything you buy). Oscar Meyer hot dogs are "USDA certified". So there.

I'd stick with butter or ghee. This idea of a private, for profit centerfuge patent by Green Pasture puts me off. They are way over priced and have a monopoly on their products. But I do buy their FCLO.

I like the taste of butter and since when did traditional cultures use a "centerfuge"? We don't need a technilogical fix for everything do we?

Weston A Price recommends "nutrient rich butters" for places where nutrition was lacking. I don't believe it's regarded as a staple, but fix for deficiencies.

I can agree with this - pastured butter (like Kerrygold) can give you some pretty good vitamins if you're lacking.

But I think it's silly to assume everyone is lacking in Vitamin A, D, and E, which is what you'd get from butter.

tl;dr: Butter is just fine. Butter oil is silly. But I don't think you need either.

Some have estimated that the concentration of vitamin K2 in butter oil is 8 times the concentration in butter, but no one really knows. If it is that high (which I doubt) then the daily dosage of butter oil recommended by Nigel of 3/4 teaspoon will contain 9 mcg of vitamin K2, or 9% of the suggested daily K2 intake of 100 mcg. An ounce of cheese will supply twice that much vitamin K2 (19 mcg), costs less and tastes better. So taking butter oil makes no sense to me.

Green Pastures did do nutritional testing on their butter oil and blogged about it. I can't find the link. Email the guy and ask.

What is high vitamin butter oil? Green grasses are rich in precursors of vitamin E. Cows grazing on GREEN Pastures consume grasses that are rich in precursors of Vitamins A and E. Vitamin A and E are a fat soluble vitamins and stays with fat portion of the milk. Using milk from cows grazing in lush GREEN pastures gives butter oil that is naturally rich in VITAMINS A and E, anti-oxidants, Omega-3 fatty acids and Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). The CLA is a healthy fat. Why is Grass-fed Butter Oil of deep yellow color? Grass-fed Butter Oil is made from the milk of cows which are fed only grass. The green grasses are rich in precursors of Vitamins A . The yellow color is due to the high level of Beta-carotene (a precursor of Vitamin A) present in the Grass-Fed Butter Oil

http://nutraprointl.com/2010/01/27/grass-fed-butter-oil-2/

Grass fed butter and Butter oil both are high in Vitamins. Butter oil is a purified oil form the Butter. There are different ways to purify. The objective is to make it a pure oil. Most of the time it is 99.0% oil weather you use centrifugation or other methods. The phospholipids that some call GUM is only 1% of total fat in butter oil. Phospholipids are essential for human health. The bottom line is find a butter oil that is certified organic and is made from milk of cows grazing on green grasses. If you buy USDA certified then you are sure about what you are buying. It is Vitamins A and D, and antioxidants that are high in Grass fed butter oil. K2 vitamin is is an advertisement. Vitamin K deficiency in humans is rare. For more information please read: link text

link text

Natures Valley does carry a limited edition pastured organic butter. It's only available part of the year. It is pasteurized but fat in butter is not as negatively impacted by pasteurization heat than proteins are as in cheese.

CORRECTION In my previous post (above) I erred by a factor of two. The recommendation by Nigel of 3/4 teaspoon of butter oil is 3.75 grams or 1/8 of one ounce. Assuming that the vitamin K2 is concentrated by a factor of 8, the recommended 3/4 teaspoon of butter oil will contain the same amount of vitamin K2 as one ounce of butter, or 4.5 mcg of vitamin K2 which is 4.5% of the recommended daily intake of 100 mcg per day.

The average daily intake vitamin K2 in the U.S.is about 25 mcg/day or 25% of the suggested intake of 100 mcg per day, so the dose of butter oil recommended by Nigel won't do much to overcome vitamin K2 deficiency.

The cost of organic pastured butter to my door is $10 per pound, or $0.625 per ounce. The cost of butter oil containing the same amount of vitamin K2 as an ounce of butter is about $1.00. The cost of an equivalent amount of vitamin K2 in organic raw milk cheese is about $.065 at $7.00 per pound for the cheese. Why take butter oil?

Many studies have shown that cheese consumption is associated with caries prevention. example pubmed 17167256

Cheese is the only food that can come close to providing needed vitamin K2.

Wildwabbit,

The article by Chris Masterjohn in the Spring 2007 issue of the Weston Price Journal includes a list of vitamin K2 content of common foods.

http://www.westonaprice.org/fat-soluble-activators/x-factor-is-vitamin-k2

Hard cheeses have about 75 mcg/100 ml compared to 15 mcg/100 ml for butter

Jack C.

Does anyone know anything about buying a centrifuge machine? If it's not very expensive, that could be a good way to make raw HVBO at home. Seems like the obvious solution, as both products on the market are pasteurized.

What is this "butter wax" of which they keep referring to? I work in a lab with a refrigerated high-speed centrifuge and I personally tried centrifuging the floating fat layer of unpasteurized cow milk at 15,000g for 30 minutes and all I got was essentially two layers: water & solids (~30%) and pure butter oil(~70%), which looks just like clarified butter, no "wax" to speak of. Assuming there are no free fatty acids in the cream (all triglycerides), there won't be any significant separation of lipid layers because they are all miscible, and because butter is about 70% fat, there was no concentration of fat-soluble vitamins. Even if Green Pastures uses a winterization process, which systematically separates lower melting-point triglycerides (which I imagine could be considered a wax because it is solid) the concentration of fat soluble vitamins would be the same in all lipid components because they are equally soluble in all lipid components.

I imagine there still may be benefits from their butter oil because it is heated only at 150 degrees instead of 250 degrees typical of conventional ghee, but the concentration of fat-soluble vitamins won't be significantly different than any other clarified grass-fed butter (unless the quality of grass is different).

Thanks for reading.

Jeremiah, thank you for your message. I read somewhere that the HVBO is made from ghee. Ghee first made via low heat process at max 150 degrees. i know this can easily be done in an oven or using a food warmer. I usually make ghee on the stovetop but now am considering this cooler temp. method if it would preserve more fat soluble vitamins. next, the same text said that the ghee is then centrifuged at a controlled temperature to separate HVBo from butter wax. I have no way of centrifuging anything except using the standatd food processor - but doubt that such primitive eguipment would do the trick. I am curious if you would be interested to try this ghee centrifuging method in your lab and let us all know what you find?

I have easy access to raw grass fed butter but this GP butter oil is way too expensive for me to order from EU. The shipping cost is almost the same as the product! So I wonder if there is hope for us here to save our teeth even without the HVBO...:-). I have a friend (from USA) who grew up on a vegetarian diet with whole grains and butter and veggies, fruit etc and had no cavities even in his thirties! His parents never let him eat SUGAR. So his teeth remained perfect.

Thank you all for helpful comments. Much love, L

There is no need to buy butter oil if you already eat plenty of butter. That Butter Oil is ONE HUGE MLM SCAM perpetrated by the cheese slave blogger person!! She gets royalties for plugging that nonsense.

YOU HAVE BEEN FORWARNED. You might as well spend your money on cigs!