Bilona Ghee vs Regular Ghee: How They're Made and Why It Tastes Different

Walk into any Indian grocery store and you will find ghee priced anywhere from ₹400 to ₹2,000 per litre — all of it labelled 'pure cow ghee'. The price gap is not just marketing. It is the difference between two completely different ways of making ghee. Most commercial ghee is cream-based. Traditional ghee — bilona ghee — is curd-based. They start from the same milk and end up as very different products.

How most commercial ghee is made (the cream method)

In a large dairy, fresh milk is run through a centrifuge that spins out the cream. The cream is then heated until the water evaporates and the milk solids separate out as ghee. It is fast, scalable, and works on industrial volumes. The flavour is mild and the colour is light. Most ghee on a supermarket shelf is made this way.

The cream method has two side effects. First, because the milk never sets into curd, the protein structure does not break down the way it does in traditional ghee — so the aroma is less complex. Second, because the production line runs continuously, milk from different sources and different days gets pooled. The finished ghee is consistent but anonymous.

How bilona ghee is made (the curd method)

The bilona method is the traditional Indian process — older than industrial dairying by several thousand years. It works like this:

• Whole milk is boiled, cooled, and set into thick curd overnight using a small culture from the previous batch.
• The curd is hand-churned with a wooden churner (the bilona) in cold water. The churning separates butter from buttermilk — the buttermilk goes to the kitchen for chaas, the butter goes forward.
• The butter is slow-heated in small batches over a low flame. The water evaporates, the milk solids brown gently at the bottom of the pot, and the ghee on top turns clear and golden.
• The hot ghee is strained through fine muslin into glass jars while still warm.

The whole process takes the better part of a day for a single batch. It cannot be rushed without losing the texture and aroma the method is famous for.

Why the bilona method tastes different

Two things change the flavour. The first is the curd step. Setting the milk into curd before extracting the fat lets the culture break down some of the proteins. When that curd-derived butter is then slow-cooked, the milk solids develop a deep, nutty caramelisation that simply does not happen with cream-method ghee. This is where bilona's signature aroma comes from.

The second is the slow cook. A low flame and small batch size gives the maker control over the exact moment the milk solids stop browning and start burning. Hit that moment right and the ghee has the grainy, golden texture that traditional cooks look for. Miss it and you get either pale, flavourless ghee or bitter, scorched ghee. There is no equivalent of this judgement call in industrial production.

How to tell bilona ghee from cream-method ghee at home

• Look at the texture in a cool kitchen. Bilona ghee usually develops a grainy, semi-crystalline structure as it cools. Cream-method ghee tends to stay smooth and uniform.
• Smell it. Bilona ghee has a noticeably stronger, sweeter, nuttier aroma when warm. Cream-method ghee smells cleaner but flatter.
• Watch how it behaves in the pan. Bilona ghee melts into a deeper-coloured liquid and crackles slightly as the trace water content leaves. It also browns spices faster.
• Read the label honestly. 'Pure cow ghee', 'desi ghee', and 'A2 ghee' are not the same as bilona ghee. If a brand makes ghee the traditional way they will say so explicitly.

Is bilona ghee actually worth the price?

If you use ghee occasionally — a spoon on dal, a teaspoon on roti — the difference between ₹600 and ₹1,700 ghee will be noticeable on the palate but small as a fraction of your monthly grocery bill. If you cook with ghee daily, bilona ghee is also where you get the strongest flavour return per spoon, which usually means using less.

There is also a practical case. Because bilona ghee is made in small batches from a known herd, you can usually trace it back to a single farm and a single breed. That traceability is hard to put a price on if you cook for children or elders in the house.

Milkaaru's bilona-method ghee

Milkaaru makes A2 Cow Ghee from milk sourced exclusively from indigenous Gir cows, and Buffalo Ghee from milk sourced from our farm-raised buffaloes. Both follow the traditional bilona method — curd-set, hand-churned, slow-cooked, strained through muslin, and bottled in food-grade glass. We do not blend cream-based and curd-based ghee, and every batch is traceable to its source herd.