I Never Cook Chicken in Olive Oil Anymore — For the “Best Flavor Ever,” I Always Swap in This Instead

As a home cook who cooks and eats more than 95% of her meals at home, I’m super into experimenting with cooking oils.  Some are far better than others for certain uses. Butter is excellent for baking and light pan-frying, but it burns easily — so if you want to get a really good crust on let’s say, a steak, you need something with a much higher burn point, like olive oil. 

Butter imparts a delicious nutty, savory flavor to dishes. The downside? It burns and rather quickly. That’s why ghee is so great for cooking. 

It has a high smoke point of 485°F with all the flavor of butter, but none of the burning (butter has a smoke point of 350°F; extra virgin olive oil has a smoke point of 410°F). 

While you can make your own ghee at home, slowly heating butter to remove milk solids and water is a timely process. Plus, the jar of 4th and Heart Himalayan Pink Salt Ghee is so good, I’d rather buy it. Its only ingredients are clarified butter and Himalayan pink salt, it’s shelf stable (because it’s clarified), and it makes roasted chicken, potatoes, vegetables, popcorn, and more taste incredible. 

Contrary to a neutral oil like canola or avocado oil, 4th and Heart Himalayan Pink Salt Ghee is full of buttery flavor. Its salt content is comparable to a salted butter, so good but not overwhelming in the slightest. So I often use it in savory searing and frying to make the most out of its pronounced buttery notes, swapping it 1-to-1 with any other seed oil or butter.

My go-to dinner of the moment is searing a whole chicken for a few minutes to get some color in the ghee and then roasting it in the oven (after throwing on some black pepper, garlic, and soy sauce) at 425°F (to take advantage of that high smoke point!) for the most flavorful and tender chicken in the entire world. The same goes for vegetables and potatoes! I’ll rub some on potato wedges or vegetables (carrots, parsnips, and broccoli) and roast until golden. They’re just divine.