Oh ghee, how I love thee
Ghee, the clarified butter known in India as the ‘sacred fat’, is a flavour miracle-worker. I'm a lifelong devotee.
For my recipe-lovers
My first encounter with ghee was in a dish that my community, the Parsis, call dhandar (dhun-daar), or what I like to call the dal for all seasons and all reasons. There’s not much to it. It’s made by combining tuvar dal (yellow split pigeon pea lentils), turmeric, salt and water and boiling it until it becomes a delicious pot of golden goodness.
But I’m digressing. Because what makes dal magic, and I’m going to go as far as to say what makes any dish magic, is the ghee. And, the handful of ingredients like slightly charred cumin or mustard seeds, crisp thin slices of garlic and crunchy, bitter curry leaves you add to the ghee to make your tadka – we’ll come to that in a minute.
Mum raised me on a steady diet of ghee. It was in my bowl of white rice as a toddler, in the simple vegetable dishes she packed for school lunches and even in all the desserts I loved!
In our home, ghee was always a job for Granny. The actual process to make ghee started a month before she needed it, when our ghee bottle was halfway through.
Our daily packet of fresh, unpasteurised milk would arrive at 6pm. Granny would empty the bag into her saucepan reserved for milk and boil it. As the milk cooled, the cream would float on the top. She’d scoop the cream off into another container, collecting four to five tablespoons each day. Because the milk was unpasteurised, the cream would start to spoil (an essential part of the process) even while it was in the refrigerator.
When the container was full, she’d wait for a Sunday afternoon when the home was quiet and get the ghee going in a big saucepan.
Meanwhile, she’d sit on a chair and do her cross-stitch while watching the stove to make sure the cream simmered without boiling over. As the mixture frothed and boiled for an hour or so, a thick, nutty, caramelised aroma filled the home. Golden liquid would start floating with the cream meaning the ghee had started to separate.
Once it reached this stage Granny would turn up the heat to make sure all the cream had separated. The milk solids must turn an amber brown. The next part of the job was to strain this whole mixture - a process that took a couple of hours because she was making the ghee directly from cream and not from butter).
Once the milk solids were completely dry and all the delicious golden nectar was in the saucepan below, the ghee was ready.
Making your own ghee with this method reminds me of making sourdough. It’s a painstaking yet rewarding process with the cream collecting similar to feeding the mother starter.
If you’re out of lockdown and don’t have that kind of time in your life you can still make ghee at home. All you need to do, is start from the butter stage and everything comes together in under an hour with the same amount of delicious.
What did I do with the milk solids? That’s a story for another day.
What is ghee?
Essentially, it’s clarified butter cooked until the milk solids separate. The long and slow clarifying process of cream to butter to ghee removes casein and lactose, making ghee suitable for the dairy-sensitive.
Because ghee is cooked long and slow, it’s rich in vitamin E, vitamin A and antioxidants. In addition, it may have anti-inflammatory properties, has a very high smoke point and the lack of water makes it naturally shelf-stable.
For my fellow millennials, ghee is the avocado on toast of fats, except that it has been used in Indian cooking for thousands of years.
Many Hindu Indians refer to ghee as the sacred fat because it’s offered on altars and used as food for the gods for centuries. Me? I call it a sacred fat because blooming your spices in ghee compared to other processed oils like sunflower or rapeseed creates a flavour miracle like no other. Think cooking with butter and multiply that by five (I’d say 10, but I have a few French friends who might get offended).
Skip the ghee-ache
Yes, you can make ghee at home, but that doesn’t mean you should. That time in the kitchen is likely spent making other more delicious things like a Tadka Dahl or a Ghee Tadka Spaghetti.
P.S. Parts of this story were originally published in an article I wrote for The Spinoff.
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