Experimenting with Indian Ghee — Clarified Butter for cooking

Posted On November 3, 2008

As much as I want my whole family to turn raw paleolithic diet, it will take some time.  I have therefore settled to begin with semi raw / cooked diet following the principles of Weston A Price’s teachings.  Along with the cookbook of Sally Falon, maybe I can make something happen for my wife and kids.  This weekend I began by buying our first can of Indian Ghee — clarified butter from the Indian grocery Assad.

They had 4 different brands of Ghee, 2 from India and 2 from Australia.  The store keeper pointed me to the most popular ghee in the store.  It came in a 1 liter can at 390 pesos… not cheap.  So happily I went home and started experimenting with it.

I opened it and it had clear golden yellow fluid on top and at the bottom was more solid waxy stuff.  Probably the same thing, it melts in the pan.

Now frying as I have said before is the worst type of cooking.  But it is the favorite form of cooking of our maids. So at least if I substitute ghee for their cooking oil, everyone benefits immediately.

Found out that ghee smells good and tastes good.  I ate ugly fried food to test out this new cooking oil.  My in laws wanted to fry catfish and they did.  Everyone agreed ghee was great stuff.  This morning I bought raw dulong, tiny 1 cm or less long fish and it is mixed with scrambled fertilized eggs then quickly fried a couple of seconds each side.  This sucked up oil… but I hope ghee is good enough oil at least those who eat it will come out better than eating so called organic but I suspect hydrogenated coconut oil, and virgin coconut oil does not taste good on fried food, in fact vco tastes awful on fried food.

I’ve seen Indian website pontificate about the goodness of ghee.  They use it for massage oil, for healing burns, as a carrier oil for herbs, oil for lamps and cooking as it is the best cooking oil in their country.