malai

I have been making ghee at home since years!

I did not stop eating ghee even when the world was drowning us with the negative reports of cholesterol and heart diseases! Why? Well, I just knew one thing. My grand father lived beyond 80 years, eating ghee in a katori everyday. He had no diseases and no pains. I have seen all the old family members have glowing smooth skins even in their seventies. I have seen them walk without any support in their eighties. I have seen them without glasses or dentures. And I have seen all of them eating ghee! I believe that anything that has been doing good to our past generations is good for us too.

Then I started reading Ayurveda and its valuable researched proven notes on Ghee.

Medicines in the olden age used Ghee as the base to mix ingredients then how it can be bad for modern people in India?

So I continued to collect malai (cream) of cow’s milk. Yes, cow’s milk is important.

I use local dairy full cream cow’s milk. No tetrapak.

Boil the milk just enough to get it to the boiling temperature. Keep it in the fridge once it’s room temperature. After a few hours, a thick layer of malai is formed on top of the milk. The longer you keep it in the fridge the thicker will be this layer.

Remove the malai using a tea strainer and store it in a steel jar in the fridge. Do not use a plastic container. You may use glass jars or large cups too.

After you have 4 to 5 cups of malai (2-litre milk takes me 30 days to make 500ml Ghee), you are ready to make ghee. This will take a few hours.

Process 1 – Messy initially but neat later

• Take out your food processor. Wash it with warm water.
• Take out all the malai and put it into the processor.

• Add chilled water with ice.
• Churn it for 5 minutes. Stop and add more ice.
• Keep on churning till the sound of the processor changes loud ghrrrrrrrrr to soft grrr. 🙂
• Stop the processor.

• Using a large vegetable steel strainer, filter out the butter milk from the butter. Yes, the thick yellowish white lump is your homemade butter.
• You can use the white butter as normal butter. It is so yum!
• In a kadhai, pour the butter lumps.
• In slow fire let the butter melt.

• The aroma of Ghee is very distinct and strong. Earlier my sons did not like it but now they love it!
• Let it cool down. Transfer it into a steel or glass container.

Process 2 – Initially less messy but later on needs an effort to clean

• Take out your kadhai and wash it with warm water.
• Take out all the malai and put it into the kadhai.
• Keep the flame on low fire and stir every 5 minutes.
• The malai will start to melt into Ghee bypassing the butter stage.
• It will take 1 to 2 hours for all the malai to be melted into ghee.

• Now the messy part.
• You will see the unwanted milk and water in the malai has burnt into brown-black residue which is crumbly and scary for the maid. But if you scrape the bottom of the kadhai frequently while ghee is made, it is easy to remove this residue.
• While the ghee is still boiling on top of the brown burnt malai, you should start to scoop out into a steel container.
• It will take some time to scoop out entire ghee but worth every second as the smell and taste will be better than the ghee made from the previous step.
• The color of this ghee will be dark golden whereas the previous step ghee will be yellowish golden.