What is Ghee (Samna)?
The Arabi Pantry
What is Ghee (Samna)?
سمنة
Butter with the water and worry removed. The frying fat the desserts and feasts agree on.
The shine on that rice is samna doing its quiet work.
Samna — ghee — is butter simmered until its water evaporates and its milk solids toast and fall away, leaving pure golden fat with a nutty depth and a smoke point high enough to fry in. Before refrigeration it was how the region kept butter through summer; after refrigeration everyone kept making it anyway, because it tastes better.
It is the flavor of celebration cooking: the rice under mansaf glistens with it, the nuts on every platter are toasted in it, knafeh's pastry is soaked in it, and the kibbeh fries in it where the house is feeling generous. A spoon of samna is the difference between rice and rice somebody's grandmother made.
How to use it
- Toasting the almond-and-pine-nut 'rain' for mansaf and maqluba
- The knob in celebration rice
- Coating the kataifi for knafeh
- High-heat frying where butter would burn
The Jar Itself
The tin and its two best friends.
Al Ghazal — the workhorse tin$12.95
The nuts it was born to toast$10.99
Vermicelli — for the rice$4.99
Free U.S. shipping on orders over $75.
Questions people actually ask
Is ghee the same as clarified butter?
Ghee goes one step further — the milk solids are left to toast before straining, which adds the nutty depth plain clarified butter lacks. Samna baladi (village-style, often from sheep's milk) is deeper still.
Does ghee need refrigeration?
No — that's its original job. Sealed and away from light it keeps for months at room temperature; refrigerated it keeps near enough to forever.
Can I substitute oil for ghee in these recipes?
Functionally yes, and the dish will cook fine. But in celebration cooking the samna is a flavor, not just a medium — the rice and the toasted nuts will tell on you.