Cooking Ghee

While it isn’t on the level of how I used to cook ghee when I worked at the ghee factory, I still make some on occasion. Back then, I would load forty 25 Kg blocks of butter (that would be 2200 pounds) into a 300 gallon(1135 liter) steam jacketed cooker and turn it into ghee.

This time around I was only using 5.5 Kg (13 lbs) of butter on a wood cook stove but the underlying principle is the same. FYI, for local readers interested in making their own ghee, I buy my butter at Aldi’s out by the Mall. They have it everyday at a price that you would have to find on sale at the regular supermarkets, plus there is no sales tax on food in Ohio.

The ideal of course would be to be making it out of our own cow’s milk but I lack the resources, energy, and potential duration of life to maintain the cow and calf for their lifetimes so I do the exchange thing and support cow protection by the temple to offset the karma of buying dairy from the market where cows will be murdered.

My goal is that by the end of my life I will have contributed to the establishment of a trust fund for cows that will contain at least $1,000,000 US. This would generate enough income that 100 cows could be keep at a bare minimum standard and allowed to live out a natural duration of life.

In any case, back to cooking the ghee. I don’t ascribe to the method of cooking off the water then skimming the floating solids and decanting from those that settle. That yields butter oil only which lacks the full potential of great tasting ghee.

I cook it until the floating solids sink to the bottom and the bottom solids coagulate. This takes longer but is worth the effort IMHO.

I cook in the winter because we are heating with the wood stove anyway, so longer cooking times don’t effect our energy usage. In the summer we use propane so it would impact our consumption of nonrenewable energy. On the wood stove, the energy goes into the ghee and cooks it, but no energy is lost because most of it escapes in the form of steam into the room which gives needed humidity and releases the heat into the room air.

The rest is released into the room when the ghee is cooling down after I have jarred it up. So the energy used for heating the ghee is zero, it is merely diverted on its way to heat the room.

Incidentally, after I took the picture above, I poured the melting butter into a larger pot. When the butter melts initially, air is released plus steam from the water in the butter, and it foams up. You either have to stir it constantly, or have a pot about twice as large as the melted butter in order to accommodate the foam without it boiling over and making a mess, albeit a fragrant one. In this case I had miscalculated the necessary pot size.

I could have sped up the melting process by opening the burner with the handle you see in the picture and putting it directly on the open flame, but I was in no hurry as I started in the morning so had all day to cook it.

The difference between the steam cooker and the stove top comes into play in the end stage when I am “polishing” the ghee, that is to say after the water has all been driven off but before the solids have coagulated. That is when the flavor of the butter is driven into the ghee.

In the steam cooker, there is no danger of burning the ghee because steam never goes above 220 degrees (105 C) (higher than normal because it is pressurized). On the stove top, the ghee without water will get quite hot and can get a burnt taste if you aren’t careful so I have to move it from over the fire box to a cooler part of the stove top, and keep an eye on it.

I make our personal ghee in the winter because it is traditionally a part of the year when you have more time and are indoors, plus with this method no extra energy is used. Ghee lasts a long time, so storage for the year is not a problem, and then we don’t have to worry about it in the summer.