The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

are not in direct contact with the metal.
But what’s the best medium to sear in? Butter or oil? And,
if I’m using oil, which one? Some claim that a mixture of
both is best, using the rationale that butter alone has too low
a smoke point (see “The Smoke Points of Common Oils,”
here)—it begins to burn and turn black at temperatures too
low to properly sear meat. Somehow cutting the butter with
a bit of oil is supposed to raise this smoke point.
Unfortunately, that’s not true. When we say that “butter is
burnt,” we’re not really talking about the butter as a whole
—we’re talking specifically about the milk proteins in
butter, the little white specks you see when you melt it. It’s
these milk proteins that burn when you get them too hot,
and believe me, they couldn’t care less whether they’re
being burnt in butterfat or in oil. Either way, they burn.