How To Make Ghee

99 Market, 1gal. Ghee
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

So you want to know how to make 1 gallon of ghee (Indian-style clarified butter)?

First, you need a cow and a lot of grass. You put the grass in the cow and wait. After a while, the grass turns to milk and you take the milk out of the cow. How much milk do you need? Google says you need 100 pounds of milk to make 3.2 pounds of butter. Google says a good milk cow will give 100 pounds of milk a day. I think one gallon of ghee is more than 3.2 pounds. I mean, look at it. That jar looks heavy. So I'm guessing that you might need more than one cow or more than one day.

After you get the milk, you have to separate the cream from the milk, then you have to make the butter from the cream.

How much butter do you have to make? Hmmm. I wonder. I guess a good place to start to figure that out is to ask how much butter is in a gallon. So: How much butter is there in a gallon? Let's see: One pound of butter is two cups of butter. One gallon of anything has how many cups in it? Google says there are sixteen cups in a gallon. So, sixteen cups of butter would weigh eight pounds. Interesting. Google also says that one gallon of milk weighs about eight pounds. A little more than eight pounds actually. But if it takes 100 pounds of milk to make 3.2 pounds of butter and you need eight pounds of butter, you need 250 pounds of milk to start. If milk is about 8 pounds per gallon, that means you need 31.25 gallons of milk to make eight pounds of butter. So, actually, you'd need one cow and two and a half days--or you'd need two and a half cows and one day. (That's if my calculations are correct, which is, frankly, a long shot.) And make a little extra butter because you probably need a little more than eight pounds of butter since you end up with two products when making ghee: Ghee and what The Journal of Dairy Science calls ghee residue.

(That's a pretty interesting article by N.C. Ganguli and M.K. Jain of the National Dairy Research Institute in Karnal, India, about ghee in The Journal of Dairy Science, by the way. It's called "Ghee: Its Chemistry, Processing and Technology" and it's in vol.56, No. 1, if you want to go read it.)

Anyway, after you get the milk, you have to separate the cream and make the butter from the cream. (You do know how to make butter, don't you? If you don't have a churn, you can use a whisk or, better, an electric mixer to do it. Don't forget to wash the butter or it might go rancid. You can give the buttermilk to your cat or, if you don't want your cat to get diarrhea, you can drink it yourself or, if you don't like buttermilk, maybe your grandma does. Mine did. She used to eat it with crackers.) After you get the butter, you have to melt it and let it stay at the right temperature and do some other stuff to it until you get ghee. I'm not real clear on ghee making from the butter to the ghee part so I asked Google. Google says do this:

Using a medium saucepan, heat butter on medium heat.

Allow butter to melt and bring to a boil, stirring. You will notice that the oil will separate. The top will begin to froth; remove froth.

Allow the oil to become clear. Once clear, remove from heat and allow to cool for 15 minutes.

After cooling, strain the ghee through a very fine strainer (or 3-5 layers of cheesecloth) into a container or jar.

Put lid on container and store on shelf.

Or you can go down the 99 Market and just buy the gallon of ghee in this picture I took just the other day.

That's what I'd do.