How does ghee compare to other cooking oils? From smoke point and flavour to nutrition and versatility, here’s why this ancient cooking fat still earns its place in the modern Australian kitchen.
Walk down the cooking oil aisle these days and there’s almost too much choice.
Olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, vegetable oil, seed oils, nut oils... all in different bottles, all promising something slightly different.
And then there’s ghee.
Ghee has been used for thousands of years in Ayurveda and Indian cooking. It certainly isn't new, trendy or something invented by the wellness industry.
Yet more Australian home cooks are discovering just how useful a good jar of OMGhee Certified Organic Grass-Fed Ghee can be.
So when it comes to ghee vs other cooking oils, what actually makes ghee different?
Let’s take a look.
The High-Heat Champion
This is one of the reasons ghee deserves a permanent spot next to your stove.
Ghee has a naturally high smoke point of around 252°C (485°F), making it a brilliant choice for high-heat cooking.
Think frying eggs, searing steak, sautéing vegetables, roasting potatoes or getting a really good bit of colour onto something in a hot pan.
We call it our high heat hero for a reason.
Different cooking fats have different smoke points and behave differently when heated. Once an oil is heated beyond its smoke point, it begins to break down, affecting both its flavour and chemical stability.
Because ghee can handle high temperatures so well, you don't need to be precious with it.
Hot pan? Fine.
Roasting tray? Fine.
Frying pan? Absolutely.
It's made to cook.
Flavour That Actually Enhances
A lot of cooking oils sell themselves on being neutral or flavourless.
Ghee is definitely not flavourless, and personally, I think that's one of its best qualities.
Properly made ghee has a beautiful rich, buttery, slightly nutty flavour. That flavour develops as we slowly cook the butter and allow the milk solids to gently caramelise before we meticulously remove them.
At OMGhee, we slowly simmer our ghee for around seven hours.
Could we make it faster? Yes.
Would it taste the same? No.
And unlike oils with very distinctive flavours, ghee works across an enormous range of foods.
Sometimes you want coconut flavour. Sometimes you want that peppery hit of a beautiful extra virgin olive oil.
But you probably don't want either of them in everything.
Ghee is different.
It adds that gorgeous buttery richness to your food without taking over the whole meal.
Nutritional Superiority
This is where the quality of your ghee really matters.
Not all ghees are created equal.
When you buy quality ghee online from OMGhee, you're getting ghee made right here in Australia from Australian Certified Organic, grass-fed butter.
Grass-fed ghee contains naturally occurring fat-soluble vitamins and fatty acids, including conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) and butyric acid.
CLA has been studied for its potential role in areas including healthy weight management and immune function, while butyric acid has attracted considerable interest for its relationship with gut and digestive health.
Ghee is also a source of vitamin A, an important fat-soluble vitamin.
And because ghee itself is a fat, it can also help with the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins from the other foods you're eating.
And this isn't just nutritional theory for me.
Changing the fats I was eating became part of my own health journey, and I noticed a real difference, particularly with the brain fog and inflammation I'd been struggling with.
That's my experience, not a promise that changing your cooking fat will do the same thing for you.
But it certainly made me start paying much more attention to something most of us use every single day: what we're putting in the pan.
And that's really where Make the Healthy Switch comes from for me.
Not food fear. Not throwing everything out of the pantry. Just looking at what you're already using and asking whether there's a better-quality choice.
The Lactose-Free Advantage
Here's another reason people often make the switch from butter to ghee.
Ghee starts life as butter, but the two aren't the same thing.
You’ll sometimes hear ghee described as clarified butter, but while they’re close cousins, they're not quite the same thing.
When we make OMGhee, we slowly simmer the butter until the water evaporates and the milk solids separate from the butterfat.
Then we meticulously remove those milk solids.
The result? Ghee is naturally lactose, casein and whey free.
So you still get that gorgeous buttery richness without the milk solids found in ordinary butter.
It's one of the reasons many people who don't tolerate butter well tell us they can happily cook with OMGhee.
And yes, this is actually part of my own OMGhee story.
I loved butter.
Butter didn't particularly love me back.
Discovering ghee meant I could have that beautiful buttery flavour in my cooking again, without going back to margarine or another highly processed alternative.
Shelf Stability Without Chemicals
Here's another very practical thing I love about ghee.
It lives on the kitchen bench.
No digging around in the fridge trying to spread a rock-hard lump of cooking fat. No complicated storage routine.
Traditional ghee is naturally shelf-stable because the ghee-making process removes the water and milk solids that make ordinary butter more perishable.
Keep your jar clean, dry and away from direct sunlight and it can sit happily in the pantry or on the kitchen bench ready for cooking.
And because we've removed the water and milk solids, there's no need to add preservatives to achieve that shelf stability.
It's simply part of what makes ghee, ghee.
Versatility That Spans Cuisines
This might actually be ghee's biggest selling point.
It's incredibly versatile.
Ghee is, of course, deeply connected to Indian cuisine and has been used throughout the Indian subcontinent for thousands of years.
But that doesn't mean you need to be cooking curry to use it.
Far from it.
Fry your eggs in it.
Roast your potatoes.
Cook a steak.
Sauté mushrooms.
Make fried rice.
Use it in a curry.
Cook your pancakes in it.
Bake cakes and biscuits with it.
And popcorn.
Seriously, try ghee on your popcorn.
Sweet or savoury, breakfast or dinner, the same jar just keeps earning its place in the kitchen.
Once people realise ghee isn't an ingredient they need to save for a particular recipe, they tend to start finding uses for it everywhere.
That's exactly how we want Australians to think about ghee.
Not as another specialty ingredient hiding at the back of the pantry, but as an everyday kitchen all-rounder that earns its spot next to the olive oil.
One jar. A whole lot of cooking.
Traditional Wisdom Meets Modern Science
One of the things I find fascinating about ghee is just how long people have been cooking with it.
We're talking thousands of years.
Ghee has an important place in Ayurveda and Indian cooking, long before anyone was talking about smoke points, fatty acid profiles or the latest nutritional research.
Modern science has given us a much better understanding of fats and how they behave, including ghee's heat stability and its naturally occurring fatty acids.
In many ways, modern nutrition is finally catching up with what traditional cooks have known for a very long time.
Ghee works.
It tastes good.
It's incredibly versatile.
And it has survived thousands of years of changing food trends for a reason.
Why Australian Sourcing and Certification Matter
Where your food comes from matters too.
Not every jar of ghee on an Australian supermarket shelf is actually made from Australian butter, or even made in Australia.
OMGhee is.
We make OMGhee right here in Australia using Australian Certified Organic, grass-fed butter, supporting Australian dairy farmers and keeping our production local.
We also hold Australian Certified Organic (ACO) certification.
That certification matters to us because organic, grass-fed, natural and premium are very easy words to put on a label.
Certification means someone has actually checked.
And when we're talking about something as simple as ghee, which is essentially concentrated butterfat, the quality of the butter we start with makes an enormous difference.
That's why we don't just say organic.
We certify it.
Making the Healthy Switch
You don't need to throw every other cooking oil out of your kitchen.
We haven't.
A beautiful extra virgin olive oil absolutely has its place. So do other cooking fats when their particular flavour or properties are what a recipe needs.
But do you really need six different bottles of oil to get dinner on the table?
I don't.
I cook a lot, and I want the ingredients sitting next to my stove to work hard.
That's one of the things I fell in love with about ghee.
The same jar can fry my eggs in the morning, roast vegetables for dinner, cook a steak, make fried rice, bake a cake or cover a bowl of popcorn on the couch that night.
Sweet or savoury. High heat or low. One jar. A whole lot of cooking.
And I'm not asking you to throw every other cooking fat out of your kitchen.
There's always a good extra virgin olive oil in ours.
I'm simply asking you to look at what you're already cooking with every day and decide whether there's a better-quality choice.
For me, there was.
That's why my goal for OMGhee has always been pretty simple: a jar of OMGhee on every Australian kitchen bench, right next to the olive oil.
Make the Healthy Switch.
