5 Traditional Ways to Use Ghee in Your Kitchen

Ghee has never needed an occasion in an Indian kitchen. It sits beside the stove, and it gets used — quietly, daily, in small quantities. Here are five of the places it has always turned up.

1. The tadka

Most Indian dishes begin with fat, heat and a handful of whole spices. Ghee is well suited to this because it holds a high temperature without breaking down the way many unclarified fats do. Warm a spoon of ghee, add cumin or mustard seeds, wait for them to crackle, and pour the whole thing over your dal.

A small note on heat: let the ghee warm through rather than smoke. Spices bloom well below smoking point, and the aroma is better for it.

2. Rolled into rotis and parathas

A thin smear of ghee on a hot roti is one of the simplest uses and still one of the best. For parathas, brush ghee between the folds before rolling — the layers separate as they cook.

3. Spooned over rice and khichdi

Plain rice, hot dal, a spoon of ghee. Khichdi with ghee stirred through at the end rather than cooked in from the start. In both cases the ghee goes in last, off the heat, so the aroma stays.

4. In sweets

Halwa, laddoo, panjiri, mysore pak — traditional Indian sweets are built on ghee. Roasting flour or semolina in ghee until it turns fragrant and changes colour is the step that decides how the finished sweet tastes, and it cannot be rushed.

5. Finishing, not just cooking

Try it as the last thing rather than the first: over steamed vegetables, into a bowl of soup, across a baked sweet potato, on top of dal makhani just before it goes to the table.

Storing what you use daily

Keep the jar closed, keep it out of direct sunlight, and always use a dry spoon. Water is the one thing ghee does not tolerate — a wet spoon is the usual reason a jar goes off early.