Use ghee in two ways: early, as the hot fat that cooks spices, flour or vegetables, and late, as a finishing spoonful stirred into dal, rice or roti for aroma. Most everyday dishes need only one of the two. India's dietary guidelines also suggest keeping the total small, so it pays to put ghee where you will notice it.
At a glance
- Add ghee early when it is the cooking medium (a tadka, roasting flour for sweets, parathas) and late when you want to taste it (dal, khichdi, rice, roti).
- Ghee's aroma compounds, lactones and carbonyls among them, are volatile, so long, hot cooking drives them off before the dish is served.
- Tadka order: whole seeds first, aromatics next, powders last for a few seconds, then pour the fat over the dish at once.
- ICMR-NIN's 2024 guidelines limit ghee or butter to one or two teaspoons a day within 20 to 50 g of visible fat, so spend it where it shows.
- Do not refry in used fat, and ventilate: frying puris in ghee gave the highest volatile emissions of seven fats tested in a York laboratory kitchen.
Should you add ghee at the start or at the end of cooking?
It depends on the job. Add ghee at the start when it is the cooking medium: for a tadka, for roasting flour or semolina, or for frying onions. Add it at the end when you want its own aroma, as with dal, khichdi, rice or roti. Many dishes use one of each, with oil underneath.
The reason is in what gives ghee its smell. A 2025 laboratory study in Food Chemistry: X describes ghee's flavour compounds, among them free fatty acids, lactones and carbonyls, as products of the Maillard reaction and of sugar dehydration and degradation. The authors note that lactones carry coconut, peach and sweet notes, and that because their flavour thresholds are low they shape the flavour even in small amounts.
These are volatile compounds. Volatile means they leave readily as vapour, which is how they reach your nose at all. The longer and hotter the ghee cooks, the more chance they have to escape before the dish reaches the table. Our article on ghee's smoke point and high-heat cooking covers the frying side of this in more detail.
Why do spices need hot fat at all?
Some of the compounds that give spices their colour and aroma dissolve in fat rather than water, and heat is what drives aroma out of a spice. Cooking spices briefly in hot ghee or oil does both jobs at once: it releases those compounds and gives them a fat to travel in, which then carries them through the dish.
A review in Foods describes curcumin, the yellow pigment in turmeric, as a lipophilic compound, meaning it is drawn to fat rather than water. That fits the habit of adding turmeric to the hot fat rather than to the cooking water.
At the University of York, chemists measured what is given off in a test kitchen while cooking. When 16 herbs and spices were shallow-fried one at a time, the team identified over 100 volatile compounds. When they then cooked a full chicken curry, each stage had its own chemical signature: heating the oil was linked to aldehydes, and frying the spices to monoterpenes, a family of aroma compounds. In plain terms, frying the spices is the step at which their aroma compounds come off. That study fried the spices in rapeseed oil, not ghee, and measured the air rather than the food.
The practical lesson: what you smell in the kitchen is aroma that has already left the pan, so pour the tadka over the dish promptly.
How do you make a ghee tadka step by step?
Heat the ghee in a small pan, add whole seeds first, then aromatics such as garlic and chillies, then powders last for a few seconds. Pour the whole thing, fat included, over the dal or dish straight away. That is the usual order: the hardest ingredients go in first and powders last, for the shortest time.
- Heat the ghee in a small, heavy pan or tadka ladle over medium-high heat until it is hot but not smoking.
- Add whole seeds first: cumin, mustard or fenugreek. Wait for cumin to sizzle and darken slightly, or for mustard seeds to pop.
- Add aromatics next: sliced garlic, dried red chillies, curry leaves. Garlic should turn golden, not brown.
- Add powders last: asafoetida, red chilli powder or turmeric, for a few seconds only. Many cooks take the pan off the heat first, because powders darken almost at once.
- Pour immediately over the dal, raita or sabzi, scraping in every bit of fat, and stir it through or leave it on top.
Which dishes get ghee early and which get it late?
Roasting, tempering and frying use ghee early, as a cooking medium. Rice, dal, khichdi and plain roti use it late, as a finish. Parathas and sweets sit in between, because the ghee is both cooking the food and flavouring it. The table below sets out the usual point for common dishes.
| Dish | When to add ghee | What it is doing |
|---|---|---|
| Dal (tadka dal, dal fry) | In a separate tadka at the end, poured over | Releasing spice aroma; adding its own |
| Khichdi | A spoonful on top when serving, or in a final tadka | Finishing flavour |
| Plain rice or jeera rice | Over hot cooked rice; or seeds fried in ghee before the rice goes in | Finishing flavour, or a tadka for jeera rice |
| Roti or phulka | Brushed on just after it comes off the tawa | Finishing flavour |
| Paratha | Between layers and on the tawa while cooking | Cooking medium that crisps the layers |
| Sabzi (dry vegetables) | At the start, often with or instead of oil | Cooking medium for tempering and sautéing |
| Roasted vegetables | Tossed through before roasting | Cooking medium |
| Halwa, laddoo, barfi | At the start, to roast the flour, sooji or besan | Cooking medium and the main flavour |
| Upma or poha | At the start, for the mustard-seed and curry-leaf tempering | Tadka built into the dish |
None of this is a rule; some households temper dal in oil and finish it with ghee. The useful question is whether the ghee is there to cook or to be tasted.
How much ghee should you use?
India's national guidelines give a daily figure rather than a per-dish one. ICMR-NIN's 2024 Dietary Guidelines for Indians advise limiting ghee or butter to one or two teaspoons a day, or avoiding it if possible, within a total for all visible fat that depends on how active you are.
Visible fat, in the guidelines' terms, is everything you add in the kitchen or at the table: cooking oil, vanaspati, butter and ghee. The guidelines set that total at 20 to 50 grams per person per day, which they translate as 4 to 10 teaspoons, depending on energy needs. For a 2,000 kcal diet they say no more than 27 to 30 grams is needed, and for sedentary adults they recommend limits of 20 grams for women and 30 grams for men.
Put together: at the guidelines' own conversion of about 5 grams a teaspoon, one or two teaspoons of ghee is 5 to 10 grams, so even at the upper end ghee is about a third of a 30-gram day, with the rest coming from cooking oils. That is one more argument for using ghee where it counts, as a finishing spoon or a tadka, rather than as the default frying fat. The guidelines do not give an amount per dish, and we will not invent one. If you have a heart condition, diabetes or have been told to watch your fat intake, follow your doctor's advice on how much is right for you.
Can you use ghee for sautéing, roasting and frying?
Yes. Ghee is almost pure fat with very little water, so in the pan it behaves like an oil rather than like butter. It sautés onions, roasts vegetables and fries puris well. The main questions are cost, flavour and kitchen air, not whether it can take the heat.
The USDA FoodData Central entry for clarified butter (ghee), parts of which USDA notes were calculated from a product label, lists 100 grams of fat and 0.5 grams of water per 100 grams, with no protein or carbohydrate. That near-absence of water and milk solids is what separates ghee from butter in a hot pan.
Two cautions apply to frying in ghee. The first is reuse. ICMR-NIN warns that repeated heating of cooking oils and fats generates harmful oxidative compounds and should be avoided. Its household advice, written for vegetable oil, is that oil used once for frying can be filtered and used for curry within a day or two, but not used for frying again. The same caution makes sense with ghee.
The second is ventilation. In the York test kitchen, puris were fried in seven different cooking fats, and ghee gave the highest total emission rate of volatile organic compounds, about 14 milligrams a minute against 8 for groundnut oil, the lowest. During frying, average concentrations of two aldehydes, acetaldehyde and hexanal, were 2 to 10 times higher than recommended limits for indoor air. That was one laboratory kitchen, not a health study, but it is reason enough to run the extractor or open a window when you fry.
What is the best way to finish a dish with ghee?
Add it off the heat, or in the last minute, and stir it through so it coats the food rather than pooling. Use ghee at room temperature, which is soft and easy to spoon, and use a clean, dry spoon every time so no water gets into the jar.
Finishing is where the ghee itself is most noticeable, because it barely cooks. In the Food Chemistry: X study, the way the ghee was made changed its volatile flavour compounds substantially while leaving its fatty acid composition largely the same. If you keep a curd-churned ghee such as Himdhara's A2 bilona ghee, this is the place to use it.
The short version
Use ghee early when it is the cooking medium, for a tadka, for roasting flour in sweets, or for parathas. Use it late when you want to taste it, over dal, khichdi, rice and roti, because its aroma compounds are volatile and can escape during long cooking. ICMR-NIN advises limiting ghee or butter to one or two teaspoons a day within an overall cap on visible fat, so spend it where it shows. Do not refry in used fat, and ventilate the kitchen when frying.
Sources
Further reading behind the figures above. Himdhara's own numbers — yields, batch results — come from our production records and the batch reports on the lab reports page.
- ICMR–National Institute of Nutrition (2024). Dietary Guidelines for Indians. ICMR-NIN, Hyderabad.
- Kumar A, O'Leary C, Winkless R et al. (2025). Fingerprinting the emissions of volatile organic compounds emitted from the cooking of oils, herbs, and spices. Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts.
- Kataria D, Singh G (2025). Effect of processing methods on fatty acid composition and flavour profile of clarified butter (ghee) obtained from Deoni and Holstein Friesian cow breeds. Food Chemistry: X.
- Hewlings SJ, Kalman DS (2017). Curcumin: A Review of Its' Effects on Human Health. Foods.
- U.S. Department of Agriculture (2019). Butter, Clarified butter (ghee). FoodData Central, SR Legacy.