Food time. Making Ghee or clarified butter.

So we are less than a month from starting our hike and we are getting to the point where we will be dehydrating the rest of our meals that will be sent to us. I'm not sure if I posted this before but because of the calories we will be burning while hiking, MC will have to consume around 3,000 calories per day and I will have to consume around 5,000 calories per day. That is a lot to ask when you aren't carrying a weeks worth of food on your back. So you might ask "how is this done?" Well, we are no experts but we know a bit about how to lighten our loads. You have to eat as many calorie dense foods as you can. Protein bars and oatmeal are good for breakfast. Snickers contains most of the essentials. Fat is what you want so that you can keep your energy up. This can be found in peanut butter, oils, nuts, and butter to name a few. Butter will melt, so you can make Ghee which is clarified butter that has the dairy removed. It is shelf stable (meaning you don't have to refrigerate it) for up to a year if made correctly.
I am going to try to attach some photos of us making this stuff. I am excited to see if it works because it will be able to add instant calories to any meal for me. Backpackinglight.com has been invaluable with their conversations about backpacking food as well as many other topics I have endless questions on.
3 more days of work and we will be free to spend all of our time preparing for our departure and learning more pottery! Yippee!

This is me scraping the white dairy stuff off the top of the melted butter.

This is what the white stuff looks like and what the clarified butter should look like underneath it.

This is us filtering the skimmed butter through a coffee filter. Not much seemed to pass through and we had to keep changing filters which wasted the butter stuck to the filter. We would like to use a cheese cloth next time and see how that works. (Update: the cheese cloth works WAY better)

Here is the final product. I used 4 sticks of unsalted organic butter. That didn't quite yield a pint. Would like to get more out of it next time. We will see.

This last picture is the clarified butter in one of our fancy squeeze tubes. It opens up wide on the opposite end from the cap so you can pour large amounts of whatever inside of it. We will see how it works for the ghee.