Kalyan Karmarkar, a writer on food and nutrition in India, goes back in time.
He enjoyed ghee in his favorite Bengali dishes today. This ghee is added to steamed rice, with which fried fish is also served. Apart from this, there were rice cooked in water, boiled potatoes and boiled eggs.
Khichdi, made from rice and lentils, is considered a rainy day dish by Karmakar and incomplete without ghee, but it wasn’t always like that.
“I belong to people who grew up with the impression that ghee is bad for health and now I’m using it,” he says.
“It’s (basically) the best food on earth,” he says.
Ghee was a staple of the subcontinent’s diet for thousands of years, but it fell into disrepute a few decades ago when saturated fats were considered unhealthy.
But recently, as the world is changing its mindset about saturated fat, Indians are also finding ways to reverse their consumption of the staple food.
Karmarkar says that people are more attracted to food. The campaign to ‘return to its roots’ interest in ghee has been going on in India for years, but it gained momentum during the Corona pandemic.
This movement is part of a trend towards ‘slow food’, explains Carmarker.
Under the philosophy of this movement, ghee can be made locally, even at home, and has an indelible cultural value.
Gir Organic is a dairy farm in the city of Surat in the western state of Gujarat, India, where ghee is made. Its co-founder Nitin Ahar loves making ghee.
Instead of importing foreign breeds like Jerseys, Holsts and Friesians like other traders, they have raised the cows. It is a breed of cow native to the Gir mountains and forests of Kathiawar.
The Nitins allow the animals on their farm to graze freely and ensure that the calves are given their rightful milk from their mothers before they are milked.
They make A2 ghee, a type of ghee that is considered more nutritious, using the bellona method.
In this method, a small machine, driven clockwise and anti-clockwise by a motor, is a replica of the traditional hand-operated mathani or balloon.
Nitin believes that this is a process that does not cost much and does not hinder large-scale production.
Not only this, they estimate that the demand for ghee has increased by 25 to 30 percent since the start of the Corona epidemic.
At a basic level, ghee is considered to be the refined form of butter. This method was first adopted in India to prevent butter from spoiling in hot weather.
The butter is boiled on low heat until the moisture evaporates and the milk solids which appear brown in color are separated. This results in a richly aromatic fat.
But for many Indians, ghee has historically been more sacred than cooking.
Author Preetha Sin says that ghee is the purest form of milk—that is, the stuff that comes out at the end.
He says that ‘it is considered the purest offering to the gods and it is the means by which prayers are sent to the heavens.’
Chicago-based mojo Colleen Taylor-Sin has written a book on the history of feasting and fasting called Feast and Fast: A History of Food in India. He has said about ghee that its history is thousand years old.
“Ghee is defined in the Rigveda, a collection of prayers and hymns dating back nearly four thousand years.”
Prajapati says that ‘the god of creation rubbed his hands and made ghee for the first time, which he dripped into the flames for the creation of his children.’
Ghee is closely related to Indian culture. Traditionally, followers of the Hindu religion consider it auspicious to use ghee after lighting a fire during marriage, death and other rituals.
Sandeepa Mukherjee, a US-based author, writes a blog called Bong Mom’s Cookbook. When it came time to feed their children, they chose ghee without hesitation.
“It’s a good fat for new bones and brain development and vitamin delivery,” she says.
His mother is even a step ahead of him who insists on using homemade ghee.
“She used to make ghee in small jars and then she would hand it to whoever was going across the Atlantic to her grandchildren,” says Datta.
“That ghee was pure and tasted like a gift from heaven.”
Datta says that ghee is not only used for cooking or frying food, but before the advent of today’s fancy cereals and porridges, every Bengali child would eat ghee aloo shido bhat (ghee-boiled potatoes) for breakfast on their way to school. He used to have breakfast of rice.
It is unofficially the state food in Bengal, she explains.
“In those days when carbohydrates and fat didn’t have a bad reputation, mothers felt that this dish was a source of energy for their children throughout the day.”
This bad reputation is due to claims that saturated fats are bad for heart health—ghee contains 50 to 70 percent saturated fat.
For a few decades, the consumption of ghee in India declined.
In the 1980s, industries promoted vegetable oil and then when its use increased, the use of ghee declined.
“The urban and Western-influenced populations have started to use vegetable oils less and less for traditional oils,” he says.
Then with the passage of time the use of unflavored refined or pure oil became the norm and the use of ghee became uncommon.
Ranwar Brar is a writer and a judge on MasterChef India as well as runs his own restaurant.
He says that since the 1980s the debate on fat has tended to villainize saturated fat, fortunately we now know better the place of fat and cholesterol.
Experts still advise against eating a high-fat diet, but some have begun to soften their stance on the dangers associated with saturated fat.
Ghee has also grown in popularity in countries like the US due to the high-fat keto diet.
But the West’s interest in ghee may have misled the people there.
Brar says that the goal of cooking in ghee is not to get it so hot that it reaches smoking temperature, after which it starts to burn, but only to the point where it starts to taste.
Moreover, in India, ghee is not used in large quantities as a quick fix or to keep the carb low. Rather traditionally one of the approaches to ghee is innovation, harmony and grace.
Here the yellow fat, which is not only added to coffee but also added to food as a finishing touch, turns into a golden liquid when heated that can be consumed.
So how is ghee best used? Brar suggests that ghee be used in pulses or in curd-based foods such as korma.
Can be used on soups, on your own bread in winter. You can also use it to marinate, it then becomes a main ingredient in anything you eat.
Chef Manish Mehrotra is the director of Indian Accent Restaurant. He says when he was setting the menu, it was important for him to accommodate the unique taste of ghee. They are confident that the world is understanding their country’s cuisine and recognizing its authentic taste.
Among the dishes made at their restaurant in Ghee is Ghee Roast Mutton Boti.
He says ghee gives the dish a smoky-sweet flavor, making it one of our best-selling dishes.
Chef Nikita, who is associated with a restaurant in Mumbai, believes that everything in food should have a distinct taste.
Explaining this, she explains how using ghee allows it to absorb into other ingredients and allows them to hum, i.e. retain their natural properties.
Their morning glory salad is topped with tamarind dressing and topped with homemade cream and ghee, curry leaves and silk pepper.
She says ghee is less than 10% in the whole salad but people definitely love it, the ghee made from cow’s milk, butter is the highlight of the whole dish.
To understand ghee is to understand the Indian identity as a whole, an approach to food that is harmonious, whole and balanced, where ghee is neither too little nor too much. And when ghee is understood in its true sense, good things are necessarily adopted.
Breyer says he has ghee at an arm’s length from his stove.
“I grew up in Chennai under the shadow of my grandmother and the whole house smelled of ghee. When I take ghee, I look for more than fat/fat in it, it takes me back to my childhood.’