Ghee is one of the holiest ingredients of an Indian kitchen. Packed with glorious aromatic flavor, it is an imperative condiment to many popular South Indian dishes. From Perumal Koil Pongal to Bai Biriyani, Ghee is omnipresent and does not discriminate. Producing this most inclusive ingredient is a pretty delicate process and one has to know the right techniques to prepare it at home.

Ladies from the previous generations mastered this art and produced the ghee they wanted at home with ease. Traditionally, ghee is made from cows milk. As we are supplying full-fat cows’ milk to our customers, and as we are all locked down due to COVID-19, we thought this would be the right time to bring back this beautiful process of ghee making at home.

The Challenge

We knew that a few of our customers are producing ghee at home using our milk. We wanted to engage them so that they could share their process with our Paal community and help more of us to try doing the process. Meanwhile, we thought we could also document some of the best practices that are used in our kitchens.

So we announced our little self-sustainability challenge with the community, our first-of-its-kind activity. We requested our customers to participate in the challenge for the next 10 days to see how much ghee they could make at home by following very simple steps. We developed a program that would guide and engage the participants throughout these 10 days.

The Outcome

Participants started to collect malai every day from the milk which would usually be filtered away and go waste. A few of them shared their secret tips to get the best yield. We quickly shared it with our community members too. At the end of this blog, we will list out all the tips we have received for you. Here are some of the videos and images shared by our customers below,

View this post on Instagram

Congrats to Sreeja Srinivasan for fluffy butter balls and aromatic ghee. Thanks for your contribution to paal self sustainability challenge mam.

A post shared by Paal (@paalgram) on May 2, 2020 at 1:31am PDT

You can check out our FB and Insta page for more pictures and Videos.

Our customers told us that mining this liquid gold at home was an extremely satisfying experience. It gave them, and us, a feeling of celebration and accomplishment. We look forward to doing more such activities,  so please let us know if you have got any ideas.

Bottle to Bowl tips:

Here are some of the tips we received from the participant group.

• Once the milk is boiled, continue to boil it in the simmer for 30 seconds. It will help in getting more malai. This technique can also be used to set thick curd.
• Use the freezer to store the malai that gets collected every day.
• Add curd to ferment the malai. Make sure you bring the malai to room temperature before adding curd.
• Add ice cubes with the cream in the blender while churning the butter.
• Instead of curry leaves, you can also use Betel leaves for a unique flavor.
• The process of creating ghee is complete once the water evaporates and the fat (clarified butter) is separated from the milk solids. However, the production of ghee includes simmering the butter, which makes it nutty-tasting and aromatic. (Wikipedia)

If you got any more tips and tricks that you can share, please let us know. We will update it in this blog.