trusty ghee, always good

also i have been eating a lot of chilli - scorpion strike and a "mad dog" chili essence

if it is food we have put chili on it

How me and the wife make ghee, or how my ancestors made ghee.

Basically, you take fresh milk, and you boil it, then let it cool, the fats, or the cream, rises up on cooling, forms a layer of malai or dense cream. You skim this off and set it aside, preferably in a plastic container, in the freezer (the part where ice forms).

You add to this daily. Then once a month, you have enough, let it out of the freezer, then whisk it, beat it once it thaws and you turn it into butter. In the older days, this butter would be edible, but now since we are making it once a month with month old cream... it turns out to be sour/bitter tasting and sour smelling.

Now what you need to do is to pour out the whey and put the blob of butter into a wok/kadhai and let it render down, till all the water goes away, keep stirring it up from time to time so that the milk solids do not burn at the bottom of the wok, once the water is all gone, you let it simmer a bit till the entire liquid attains a golden hue. Decant this, sieving it through a muslin cloth or a fine sieve. The rest of the milk solids left, can be scraped off the pan and put into the same cloth and sqeezed to get the most of the ghee out of them. Store this ghee either at room temp or in the refrigerator (no freezing). Use it as and when required.

In the older days, at least in the part of the country i hail from, people had many cows/buffaloes per household and as a result would have a load of milk and cream. Thus they could make butter daily and it would be fresh and awesome. the left over butter from the day was collected and stored, and once a month they would put all that together to make ghee. Or whenever they ran out of storage to store the butter, or ran out of ghee.

What is Ghee?

Tabakmaaz:

To start you guys off, I am sharing my way of making this traditional dish from my homeland. Since it is the first one i wanted to make it so that heat is not a concern and all the tender palate'd folk can enjoy this too.  I swear i dont even add any chilli peppers to this.

Ingredients:
Lamb Ribs : 1 Kilo
Milk : About half a cup
Water : About half a liter
Dry Ginger Powder : 1 tsp
Aniseed Powder : 1 tsp
Cinnamon Powder : 1 tsp
Hing (Asafoetida) Powder : a pinch, no more than that
Ghee : 0.25 kilos or 250 g
Salt : to taste
cloves : 2-3

OK for this dish, it is essential that your meat be just right. You need a butcher and not a supermarket. Unless you are geared like me to prepare your own meat prior to cooking it.

What you need is that the ribs of the lamb be not devoid of the muscle. That is to say we do not want the "ribs-alone" the thick pad of muscles covering the ribs has to be retained. Each piece will be about 5 inches in length and about 2 inches in width. This means that each section would be 2-3 rib bones in it, also the ribs will have to be cut across. We also do not want the vertebrae in the pieces. So you take the entire rib section and cut it into rectangular pieces, cutting across the ribs.

Once you have your meat all cut up, do the following:

Take the water and add the milk to it, put in the aniseed powder, tumeric powder, ginger powder, salt, asafoetida and cinnamon powders. Add the ribs to this and boil it on a slow flame till the meat is tender and all the water disappears.

Take a kadhai and add the ghee to it and start frying the meat in it one by one, till they turn crispy on both sides.

Serve Hot.


Attention: i am not a beef eating person, i have no clue what this recipe would be like on beef. For that matter i have never tried it with anything other than lamb or goat, so basically, mutton.

Coward?  How is stopping a count cowardly?