Ma’s Homemade Ghee With Butter

My grandmother made fantastic ghee. There was always a very large bottle in her meat safe and sometimes when she had extra we would be the lucky recipients.

She would collect the cream from the milk from her buffaloes and cows and make it into delicious ghee that we would pour over rice and dhal or ganji (rice porridge) or payasa ( sweet porridge like dessert), blissfully ignorant of the calories it contained. My Mum also made delicious ghee. She would get some local milkman to deliver milk and daily collect the cream that rose to the top the next day after boiling and cooling the milk. When she had enough of cream, she would make it into the rich, creamy, golden yellow, buttery, rich concoction we all loved. As a special treat both she and my Grandmother would boil a few betel leaves along with the cream and we would greedily wait for them to be shared out to us once the ghee was done. Just looking at this photograph evokes the most heavenly smells and scrumptious tastes. Food eaten with a dollop of ghee is like none other.

Stages of Making Ghee

Stages of making Ghee

Stages of Making ghee.

Bottling when ready.

Bottle when cool and store.

Showing the homemade Ghee during a cooking class.

Ingredients:

4 to 6 cups of cream collected over a period of three to four weeks convert to butter before making ghee

500gmshomemadebutter,unsalted; I use whatever we have at home. It could be cream or it could be butter. When you use butter, you get a lot more ghee. So you can churn the cream in the mixer 3 to four times and skin the butter off the top each time and then use the butter to make ghee.
Store the cream or butter in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator till required;

4 betel leaves (The betel (Piper betle) is the leaf of a vine belonging to the Piperaceae. If you don’t have betel leaves, use a stick of cinnamon and 2 or 3 cloves or 1 onion sliced fine ( which is what my husband requests whenever I make ghee and waits patiently for me to finish straining the ghee. He then gets to savour the fried onions. Yum)!

Method:

Bring the butter to room temperature. Pour/place it into a large, heavy bottomed pan. Place the pan on the fire at medium heat. Throw in the washed and dried betel leaves. Bring to the boil and then simmer until the solids sink to the bottom. This takes about 12 to 15 minutes. Skim off the foam from the top. Cool and strain with a fine wire mesh strainer into a glass bottle so that the beautiful colour can be seen. You can either eat the milk solids with a little bit of sugar or add it to your puri or chappathi (Indian flat bread) dough or cakes and biscuits and enjoy that for a one in a million taste and sensational aroma.

This is how I make Ghee with Butter