Bilona Cow Ghee

Details

Ghee made the bilona way. Whole cow milk is set to curd, the curd is churned to makkhan and only the makkhan is clarified. That is a longer and far more wasteful route than separating cream and boiling it, it takes roughly thirty litres of milk to reach a kilo, and it is exactly what a person means when they ask for bilona. Milk comes from smallholder herds in the Gujarat dairy belt and is set the same day it is collected. What gets sold as ghee in India is very often not ghee at all. Vanaspati, the hydrogenated vegetable fat, is the oldest filler. Palm oil and palm stearin are the cheap modern one, and they melt and set close enough to ghee to pass a kitchen eye. Rendered animal body fat, tallow and lard, is the one that turns up when the price of milk fat runs away from the price on the tin. None of the three survives a laboratory. Vanaspati has to carry five percent sesame oil by law precisely so that the Baudouin test can find it inside ghee. Reichert-Meissl value measures the short-chain butyric acid that only milk fat carries, so a vegetable-fat cut drags the number down. A fatty acid and sterol profile on a gas chromatograph separates milk fat from body fat and from palm. Every lot here is run through all three.

• No vanaspati or hydrogenated fat, Baudouin test negative
• No palm oil or palm stearin, confirmed by fatty acid profile
• No animal body fat, tallow or lard, confirmed by sterol profile
• No added starch, no colour, no synthetic ghee flavour
• Cow milk only, never a buffalo blend
• It is grainy, it sets hard and pale in winter and goes clear and runny in summer, because there is nothing in it to hold a texture steady
• The colour and the aroma shift with the season and the fodder, which is the honest signature of a real lot
• If you are buying ghee for the everyday tadka rather than for the bilona itself, the plain Cow Ghee on this shelf is the same milk and the same three tests at a lower price