Gluten-free Vanilla Cupcakes

Ghee is a clarified, caramelized, and non-perishable form of butter. It was born due to a need to preserve butter in a tropical climate, thousands of years ago with no refrigeration. We slow simmer butter for hours and hours until the moisture in butter evaporates, and the milk solids (sugars like lactose, and proteins like casein and whey) caramelize.

The result is a golden, caramelly cooking oil that can be used in a multitude of ways!

Store ghee on your kitchen counter, or cabinet. A cool, dry place away from direct sunlight is ideal. It should last up to a YEAR if clean, dry utensils are used!

ABSOLUT-GHEE! Substitute ghee for butter 1:1 in your recipes.

You may hear that “ghee is better for you than butter”. We’re here to BUST THAT MYTH. Nutritionally ghee is almost IDENTICAL to butter. It has a slightly higher fat content due to the absence of moisture, but aside from that, it is virtually the same.

From a nutrition stand-point, the free fatty acid profile, calorie count, vitamins and mineral profiles are nearly identical. The only real ‘health benefit’ comes to those who have traditional dairy allergies (lactose, casein, whey) and cannot consume those commonly found components in butter - as they are filtered out in ghee.

Lastly, cooking at high temperatures with butter leads to milk solids burning, which can be unhealthy in the long term with prolonged use. Ghee’s higher smoke point (485F) makes cooking with ghee a lot easier and healthier.

We are different from every other ghee company out there. We take pride in understanding our products’ origins, sources, and safety profiles, and we are a company founded by people born and raised in South Asia - giving us a real understanding of how ghee should actually taste. At the end of the day, we believe that these core values help us bring a product to market that is well backed by knowledge and peer-reviewed science.

Most people will tell you that Ghee is clarified butter.

We disagree wholeheartedly.

Ghee is a type of clarified butter that is heated past the point of clarification until it caramelizes, giving it a brown buttery, nutty, rounded flavour profile. Most brands in North America stop their cooking process at clarification, often making an undercooked ghee that smells and tastes milk/ raw.

OG GHEE is well caramelized making it a completely different flavour profile to almost every single ghee product on the market. This recipe was formulated through the founders experience of cooking with his mother during his childhood.

The founder’s unique perspective of being a south Asian immigrant, brings authenticity and legitimacy to this product, when most other brands of “premium” ghee are founded by folks with no traditional ties and upbringing in the culture.

When you compare OG Ghee to other low-cost value brands, there really is no competition at all. The value brands are lackluster in flavour profile, visually unappealing with their semi-solid, semi liquid texture, and are packaged in the worst possible format – plastic jars.

You will get an email notification when your product is ready for pick-up, along with the time window for pick-up. Please note that some of our pick-up locations are hosted by volunteers - your kindness, patience and courtesy is appreciated.

100% - If you order more than $65 worth of products, delivery is included.

At Vresh Foods, we take our sourcing VERY seriously, and make an effort to ensure the BEST possible product on the market - which all of our customers agree wholeheartedly with.

Our company’s core philosophy is sourcing our ingredients domestically, and therefore supporting the world-renowned Canadian dairy industry. Canadian Dairy is some of the best in the world. Not many people are aware of supplement/medication use in dairy, and automatically assume that because something is not organic, it is filled with hormones and antibiotics.

We work with family owned creameries who source their cream from small-medium sized dairy farmers across the country, ensuring a high quality benchmark, and minimal industrial optimization.

OG GHEE is made with conventional, 100% Canadian Butter which is certified by the Dairy Farmers of Canada. Creating an organic product is within our scope and goals, however, certified organic Canadian dairy pricing is currently at 10 year high. This would put a single jar retail price over $45, which does not put any brand in a position to succeed. Our competitors have felt the pressure of this, and have released alternative products to combat this. The other option is to source internationally, which we do not believe is the direction for OG GHEE at this time.

It is ILLEGAL to use hormones in any active dairy producing cattle in Canada, and this is something that is HEAVILY enforced, and vigilantly audited. As a young company, these audits and compliance make it really difficult for us to navigate, but we are happy to do it because it guarantees the quality of the products.

It is good to note that a lot of media claims regarding hormones and antibiotics are true for the United States of America, and people often mistake that for the same in Canada. It is NOT the case for Canada at all - quite the opposite. Our agricultural programs and requirements are FAR superior to those of our neighbours down south.

Here are some recent articles and notes on antibiotics and hormone use in dairy cattle:

• https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/milk-antibiotics-1.3803799
• https://globalnews.ca/news/4533226/canadians-growth-hormones-dairy-usmca/
• https://dairyfarmersofcanada.ca/en/dairy-in-canada/dairy-excellence/canadian-milk-antibiotics-facts

The feed profiles of dairy cattle vary vastly from producer to producer. We currently source from small-medium, family owned creameries who source their dairy from local dairy co-operatives. Most cattle in local dairy co-operatives are pasture raised (as Canada is blessed with land as a key natural resource) in the late spring summer and early fall), and are supplemented with wheat grass, barley and other forage+silage over the course of the colder months.

There are some crop cuttings that may contain GMOs (alfalfa, corn stalks etc) that are used in the feed, but it is important to know that any claims of GMO components being found in milk are FALSE. GMOs have never been detected in dairy, even if they are used in cattle feed. At the best, microscopic fragments of this (which do not constitute an organism) have been detected in negligible quantities. Here are some third party, and science supported articles on GMOs in Milk/Dairy products.

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/gmoanswers/2016/06/28/gmos-milk/?sh=332fe95052f0
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12597493/

The Canadian climate only allows for a limited amount of domestic grass fed dairy products in the market. Most Grass fed dairy is in the form of milk, which is primarily reserved for retail sale. Any grass fed butter that is produced domestically, is often reserved for retail sale as the producers NEED the margins to survive these inflationary times. There’s simply isn’t enough supply of grass fed butter available at a wholesale level for us to be able to create a competitively priced Canadian grass fed ghee. We are on the hunt to find domestic grass fed ingredients that we can market to the public.

While we could turn to importing grass fed butter from either Ireland or New Zealand, we choose the more carbon friendly route of not shipping butter from 10,000km+ away simply to have a moniker of “grass fed”. Dairy is already a carbon heavy industry, and we want to do our part to not increasing the overall carbon footprint - by refusing to use imported dairy.

We currently source from small-medium, family owned creameries who source their dairy from local dairy co-operatives. Most cattle in local dairy co-operatives are pasture raised (as Canada is blessed with land as a key natural resource) in the late spring summer and early fall), and are supplemented with wheat grass, barley and other forage+silage over the course of the colder months.