Cow Ghee

Details

The ghee to keep on the counter and finish inside a month. Cow milk from the same smallholder herds in the Gujarat dairy belt, cream separated and clarified in a food-grade plant. That is the honest difference from the bilona tin beside it: this one does not go through curd and a churn, so it uses less milk and less labour per kilo and costs less. The milk is the same milk and the tests are the same tests. Ghee is one of the most adulterated things in an Indian kitchen, because milk fat is expensive and the substitutes are not. Vanaspati, the hydrogenated vegetable fat, is the oldest one. 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 keeps turning up when the milk price runs ahead of the price on the tin. None of the three survives a laboratory. Vanaspati must by law carry five percent sesame oil so that the Baudouin test can find it. Reichert-Meissl value measures the butyric acid that only milk fat has. A fatty acid and sterol profile on a gas chromatograph tells milk fat from body fat and from palm. Every lot is run through all three, whichever of the two tins you buy.

• 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 and never a milk-fat-plus-vegetable-fat blend
• It is smoother and less grainy than the bilona ghee and the aroma is milder, which is what the shorter route gives you
• It still sets hard and pale in winter and turns clear in summer, because that is what ghee does