Oils, Ghee & Sweeteners

Every regional cuisine in India was built on a specific fat and a specific sweetener. Coastal Karnataka cooks in coconut oil and sweetens with palm jaggery; the Deccan lives on cold-pressed groundnut and sugarcane jaggery; the North cooks in mustard and sweetens with cane sugar or gur; a Bengali kitchen leans on sarson tel and khejur gud. Somewhere between refined seed oils and refined white sugar, most of us lost the taste for those older pairings. This shelf is our attempt at putting them back within reach.

Our oils are cold-pressed on a wooden kolhu (chekku, or ganuga in Andhra) at low RPM, so the oil never crosses the temperature at which its flavour and nutrition start to break down — this is why our groundnut oil actually smells like groundnut, and our sesame oil like sesame. The ghee is cultured from A2 whole-milk curd, then slow-simmered until the milk solids caramelise into the grainy, deep-yellow bilona style you can only make in a small vessel. The jaggery is from small mills in Mandya and Belgaum, and the palm sugar from Tamil Nadu tappers who still climb the tree and boil the sap the same afternoon.

Nutritionally the case is straightforward — cold-pressed oils retain their natural antioxidants, cultured A2 ghee is easier to digest than modern factory ghee, and unrefined sweeteners keep the trace minerals that refining strips out. Beyond nutrition, though, cooking with these fats and sweeteners just tastes like the food our region has been quietly making all along, before the industrial pantry standardised everything to a bland middle.

Store cold-pressed oils in a dark cupboard, ghee at room temperature with a clean spoon, and jaggery in a dry airtight jar away from Bengaluru's monsoon. Explore below — every product on this shelf is one we cook with in our own kitchens.