How to Make, Use Ghee for Food, Lamp Oil

Ghee is made from butter and keeps for several months in a capped bottle at room temperature in a dark cabinet or something similar. This is extremely convenient in a country such as India, which has not traditionally had refrigeration available. Ghee can be used for food, cooking oil and for lamp oil. It has the same uses that olive oil has in Mediterranean countries, but it can be made wherever people keep dairy cows.

To make Ghee
Get a pound or more of sweet butter (unsalted). Because it takes a while to do this, you probably want to do a lot at one time, so use 4 lbs. Heat the butter at a low temperature in a pot until it melts and then sieve it to get the milk solids out. (Up to this point the same method is used to clarify butter for use for dipping seafood or artichokes.) Removing the milk solids is important because it will help preserve the ghee, whereas leaving the solids in makes it go bad faster. Continue to heat the butter at a low temperature just below a simmer until it has turned a clear light brown color and takes on a nutty taste. It will still taste and smell like butter. This can take several hours. It can be kept in a clean empty wine bottle with a tight cap. It does not need to be "canned" or pasteurized. If that's too much trouble, it can be bought in a grocery store or a store that carries Asian foods. The commercial kind comes in plastic jars and is bright yellow and solid at room temperature.

How to use Ghee
Ghee has a higher smoke point than butter and can be used for frying, so it makes a very good cooking oil. It is especially nice when used in cooking in such a way that it affects the flavor. Important uses are sauteing rice until it pops a little (like Rice-a-Roni (TM)). The rice is then cooked in the usual way with water, but it has a better flavor. Ghee can also be used to saute or stirfry onions and vegetables in general.

**Ghee is also traditionally used in making curry. Here is a recipe for a traditional American kind of curry called Poor Boy Curry; this recipe is not meant to be an authentic Indian recipe but it is really good.

Butter Lamps
Ghee can be burned for light in the various traditional types of butter or oil lamps that are used in India, Nepal and Tibet. A metal bottle lid will work too (but don't put it directly on a wooden table--it will burn the surface). For a wick, two or three cotton threads or dry blades of grass can be twisted together. The wick should be pushed down into the ghee or butter so that it is "wetted" by it. It then helps to use a lighted match to melt the surface of the butter and to light the wick. This will burn for an hour or more without actually burning the wick. It is necessary to spoon a little more butter into the lamp every now and then to keep it going. This makes a nice light as bright as a candle and it smells pleasantly like butter.

If the northern Europeans had known how to make and use ghee, they wouldn't have had to light their houses with sheeps' tallow, which made the houses smell like mutton. Most people in northern Europe could not afford beeswax candles all winter so they spent the winter nights hunched around a fireplace. Supposedly the great literature of Iceland was created because people had nothing better to do than tell stories in the dark. The literature was great but trying to read by firelight for six months of the year doesn't improve educational opportunities.