Vegetable ghee, butter ghee or vegetable oil? What do most indians use when making a curry at home?
This is a difficult question to answer Savs, India is so vast and Indians vary so much from one end of the country to other.
North Indians are probably more into ghee than south Indians.
Most educated people know about the cholesterol risk of ghee these days, so probably have moved more towards oil for curries. However, many still use ghee, especially for tempering dals and making sweets.
Poorer people probably use the cheapest oil they can buy, ghee is too expensive.
What I do sometimes is that I add a little ?raw?/uncooked ghee on top of the finished dish, if I want it to have a ghee flavour. I also add a little ghee to the ?tarka? oil, to give it a ghee flavour. Rest of the time, I use oil; rapeseed or mustard or olive. I know I haven?t written it down in the recipes, but it is difficult to remember to pen down everything!
Mamta.. do you make you mustard oil yourself, by adding mustard seeds to olive oil? I added some dried chili flakes to olive oil and it turned out to be really potent :)
No, mustard oil has to be pressed out of the seeds. You can't 'make' it by soaking seeds in olive oil. I buy 100% pure mustard oil in bottle. See this thread for mustard oil information; http://www.mamtaskitchen.com/board/showthread.php?thread_id=129
Luckily my local 'Bazaar' sells several brands of mustard oil - it is expensive, more so than olive oil but I think worth the extra, especially for pickles.
In emegencies I have tried adding Coleman's dry mustard powder to rapeseed oil. It lacks the depth and roundness of mustard oil but does give it that mustardy bite.
Winton