The Queen of Indian Seasoning

I’ve heard of sommeliers who can taste wine and tell from its aroma, flavour, colour, and mouthfeel where it is from, what terroir, grape varietal, and the process of making it has undergone. But recently I met someone who does the same with ghee!

Quintessential to Indian cuisine, Mr Mohan S. Narayanan calls ghee the “Queen of Indian Seasoning” – having the ability to uplift and transport the flavours and aromas of other spices in the dish.

Mr Narayanan, who recently gave a guest lecture at our BHM department in Christ University, is a realtor by profession but a ghee expert by passion. Since childhood he’s loved ghee, so as he began to travel around the state and country in adulthood, he began tasting ghee wherever he went, and out of pure curiosity, made observations about the different factors that make a ghee the way it is.

Learning about and tasting ghee with Mr Narayanan

He says, it may be referred to by a common name, but there is no singular standard for ghee. The varieties are endless. And each step of the ghee-making process affects the characteristics of the variety.

The traditional process of making ghee starts with the milk. The animal that produces the milk (cow or buffalo), its dietary materials (grass, hay, husks), its lifestyle (captive or free range), all have an effect on the final product.

The milk fat is cultured to make a mildly sour and very creamy butter

The fat collected from the milk (cream) is first cultured to make butter. This cultured butter, mildly sour, is then clarified on the stovetop or wood fire, turning it into ghee. Different temperatures result in different textures of ghee – from smooth, to pasty to grainy. And it is commonly believed that the grainy textured ghee is of the best quality. Many a time, to check if the clarification process is complete, some fresh herbs are added into the cooking pot – these vary from region to region and family to family, and could include curry leaves, lemongrass, turmeric leaves, lime leaves, even spring onions… When the leaves crackle, the clarification process is complete, and the final ghee ends up carrying the unique aroma and flavour of the herb.

Of course, we also learned the difference between traditional ghee and commercially produced ghee. If you’ve read my previous posts about chocolate and ice cream, you may already have guessed the pattern…

That’s right, commercial ghee is hardly real ghee. It is merely clarified milk fat. The milk fat or cream is skimmed off or mechanically separated from the milk, and then melted into a clarified fat. However, it is not cultured into butter first. As a result, it doesn’t have a lot of the characteristics of traditional ghee, and to make up for this they add (surprise, surprise!) colouring and flavouring!

I’m beginning to wonder, is nothing sacred anymore? Can I trust absolutely NO commercially produced food to be honest and real?

Anyway, after learning this difference, we had a tasting of one fresh butter, sourced from the town of Malvalli, and 5 different ghees, some homemade, some artisan made by small, limited batch producers in different towns and villages, and one among those, a commercially produced ‘ghee’. We had to try and guess which one the factory product was!

SVM Ghee Producers in Malvalli, who make ghee from only 10 kgs of butter every other day, and sell only till stocks last. Quality over quantity is their motto.

A small batch artisan ghee from another ghee producer in Karnataka - sandy in texture with large almost sweetish grains

A smooth and pasty ghee, sweetish and mild burn at the back of the throat - with a strong aroma of curry leaves. This one was brought by a professor - homemade from the milk of his Aunt's cow in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu

One of the above jars had a commercial ghee and the other one had a homemade ghee. Until we understood the characteristics of a good ghee, then smelled and tasted the two -- they looked the same to me.

With enough attention, we could identify noticeably different flavours and textures of each ghee – some were a bit sourer, owing to the culturing of the butter, others were grainier. Some had sweetish grains while others were a bit creamy and tart. Some had the distinct aroma of curry leaves, used in the crackling process. Most of them had a mild burn at the back of the throat, also presumably from the culturing of the butter before clarification.

The commercial ghee, we noticed, had neither such nuanced flavours, aromas of curry leaves or other herbs, nor the mild burn at the back of the throat.

In the two-hour session, we tasted 5 ghees. In his travels, Mr Narayanan has probably tasted close to a hundred different ghees from different origins.

While today Indians are studying wines, beers, and cheeses, our very own ghee is definitely an underexplored treasure. It could be the next big thing!

What do you think?


(Big thanks to my friend Ayushree Moorthy, for sharing her photos for this post!)