How to spot pure desi ghee (and why home tests are not enough)

Desi ghee is expensive, which is exactly why it is so often faked. By the Punjab Food Authority's own count, more than 258,000 kg and litres of substandard ghee and oil were destroyed across the province in 2025.

What gets mixed in

The most common trick is vanaspati or cheap cooking oil, blended with a little real ghee so it still smells right. Less often, starch such as mashed potato or flour is added to bulk it up.

Which checks tell you something, and which don't.

What you can check at home

The iodine test. Add two drops of iodine to a spoon of melted ghee. A blue or purple colour means starch has been added. It catches starch only, not oil.
The label. Look for a made date, a best-before date, a batch number, the net weight and a Punjab Food Authority licence number.
How it sets. Real ghee usually sets grainy (danedar) when cool, but grain alone proves nothing.

Melting ghee on your palm, dropping it in water or trusting the smell cannot detect vanaspati. Those tests are popular, but they are not evidence.

What a lab looks at

Reichert-Meissl value is high in milk fat and near zero in most vegetable oils (schematic, not to scale).

Reichert-Meissl (RM) value. Milk fat is rich in short-chain fatty acids, so its RM value is high. Most vegetable oils score close to zero, so a low result points to mixing.
Butyro-refractometer (BR) reading. Ghee falls in a narrow band; many vegetable oils read higher.
Moisture and free fatty acids. These show whether the ghee was cooked properly and is still fresh.

How we handle it

We send a sample of every ghee batch to an accredited lab and publish the full report on that batch's Batch Passport. We write "tested for listed parameters", never "100% pure", because no single test can prove everything.