[Fire Me Boy!]

Originally Posted by Stewie

True ghee has additional cultures, similar to yogurt. I don't know the details, but it sounds like a pain in the ass. So, there's ghee1, ghee2 and ghee3. Ghee3 is authentic, the others are simple variations.

I'm not trying to be argumentative here, really, Stewie. I like you, and your knowledge in food is well documented here.

But I'm specifically trying to find anything online that tells me about additional cultures used for ghee, even trying to find "authentic" Indian ghee recipes, and I'm finding nothing except something that is basically what I've been making. I even searched "ghee3" to no avail.

Unless this authentic ghee isn't pure oil - which as I understand it is a requirement of ghee - there's no way any cultures would grow in it.

The closest thing I could find to what you're talking about this: http://www.indiacurry.com/dairy/d005ghee.htm, which has you make a cultured butter before making the ghee. But the process of making the ghee is exactly the same, which means you could do it with pretty much any kind of butter as long as you didn't care about being 100 percent authentic. And if you did, you could buy cultured (European) butter. I've done that, by the way, and couldn't tell much of a difference, if any.

So perhaps you're friend is adding in the cultured butter step, which would make sense with what you're saying, and I totally agree would be an awful lot of work for ghee.