How To Make Ghee or Clarified Butter
Making your own Clarified Butter or Ghee was never so easy.
Materials
- full cream milk
- 1 tbsp yogurt homemade curd
- 1 litre cold water or ice
Instructions
- Boil milk. After the milk boils, keep it aside without disturbing it, so that cream can form on the upper layer of milk. Refrigerate this milk.
- After a few hours of refrigeration, the top layer will firm into a thick cream layer.
- Gently remove the cream and store in a separate bowl. Store the cream bowl back in the refrigerator.
- Repeat this process till you have collected enough quantity of cream. (1 litre of boiled milk should give around 250 ml of cream in 7-8 days)
- Warm the collected cream and allow it to cool a little. When it is cooled just enough for setting of curd, add 1 tablespoon of curd into it and mix well. For setting curd, the temperature should be lukewarm - neither too hot nor too cold.
- Allow the cream to set just like curd in a warm place. When the cream is set, refrigerate it. I usually allow it to set for 3-4 hours and then keep it back in refrigerator for 10-12 hours or overnight before churning butter out of it.
- Remove the set cream and allow it to come to room temperature for an hour or two. Then churn using a stick blender. I use a local-made, heavy duty stick blender which is used in many households specifically for churning butter only. Check the image above.
- After a few mins, the cream will start separating and you will see butter. Add cold water if required to separate. The amount and the temperature of water needed depends upon the weather conditions as well as how soon you started churning the butter after removing set cream from refrigerator.
- The butter & milk should be clearly separated where the butter floats above and forms big blobs.
- In a wok, take about half glass of chilled water or ice and remove the butter & put in it.
- Quickly rinse off the butter in this water. Continue rinsing the butter in cold water and removing the discarded water in a separate vessel.
- Repeat it till the water no longer turns milky on rinsing but it remains transparent. This is the indication that milk and butter have separated completely.
- By now the butter comes together in a big big blob. By the end of this step we have one vessel of butter milk (which is discarded water which we rinsed butter with) and homemade butter.
- You can garnish buttermilk with seasoning (ghee, cumin seeds, salt, mint leaves) & serve or plain. Use butter as desired.
- If you do not want to use the butter here, then put the prepared butter in a wok and allow it to slowly melt into ghee or clarified butter over slow flame.
- Slowly, the water content will evaporate leaving behind ghee or clarified butter. Residue will dry and become elastic and chewy chenna.
- Strain the ghee into the desired container. I usually store in a steel or glass container with wide mouth. The ghee can be stored at room temperature and used as per need. Use as desired.
- Remove the chenna from strainer & use it to knead parantha dough. This yields a soft & crumbly parantha with rich taste.
- Alternatively you can create after meal snack from this chenna by simply adding powdered sugar to it. Kids love it & it becomes a wonderful on the go snack.
Notes
- This process of making ghee is a healthy and highly sustainable process as the complete process is from scratch and even the by products are not discarded. The traditional ghee making supports our health and eco system equally.
- The process of utilizing the cream of milk to make ghee is a zero waste process. here, we get white butter, buttermilk, which can be used to make kadhi and the residue of ghee used to knead in dough for making parathas or adding milk and sugar to make sweets.
- Weather or room temperature determines this process – In winters use hot to room temp water for all steps. In summer, you would need chilled water or ice for separating & washing. As the butter needs to stick together to form a blob and in summers due to heat, its very flowy in nature we need chilled water. In winters the room temperature is lower so it forms a firm blob together much easily and doesn’t need cold water.
- You can discard any of the by-product if you wish but I like being judicious. I guess you can put it on my mom inculcating ‘Don’t waste unnecessarily’. I just love the thought of using a product & all its by-products (milk-curd-cream-butter-buttermilk-ghee-chenna).
- Ghee is surely being now considered as the “Liquid Gold” for it’s endless health benefits from our heart health, skin, hair, digestion and good sleep routine.