If getting a golden brown skin is a must when roasting your turkey, the key  is to extract as much moisture and maximize the fat. Instead of basting with the turkey’s juices or butter, we prefer glazing it with clarified butter or ghee. But which way is the best?

We basted three birds with three different clarified butter styles—ghee, stovetop, and microwaved—that’ll ensure Thanksgiving’s main dish is extra crispy every time.

Ghee vs. Clarified Butter: Is There a Difference?

To quickly summarize: clarified butter is when you remove everything that is not fat—the water and white milk solids—from butter through heat. Ghee is heated until the milk solids have turned browned and nutty-tasting and the water has evaporated.

Ghee

As a control, we bought Organic Valley ghee clarified butter and used Organic Valley unsalted butter to clarify, one via the stove-top and the other via microwave.

Stovetop Clarified Butter

To make the stovetop clarified butter, we followed Nik Sharma’s recipe on Food52.

Microwaved Clarified Butter

Put in a quart container at 40% power and zap in one-minute increments. Once melted, put in the freezer. Come back in two hours, and it will have solidified into three layers: water on the bottom, ghee, and some milk solids on the top. Pop out, pour off water, cut off any bits on the top and bottom that aren’t solid fat and use them for something else.

The Winner: Microwaved Clarified Butter

The verdict? The microwaved butter yielded the crispiest skin although only by the smallest margin. Whatever method you choose will likely yield a very similar result, whether you prefer to buy ghee or make the clarified butter yourself on the stove-top or microwave.

Finish off your bird by making turkey gravy with a fat separator.