Bilona is not a brand, a grade, or a marketing word. It is a description of one specific step: the ghee was made by churning curd, not by separating cream.
That single difference is what separates bilona buffalo ghee from most of the buffalo ghee sold in India.
The four steps
- Fresh buffalo milk is boiled, cooled, cultured, and left overnight to set into thick curd.
- The curd is churned by hand with a wooden bilona until white butter — makhan — separates and rises.
- The makhan is lifted off and slow-cooked until the water cooks out and pure ghee is left.
- The ghee is strained and jarred.
The commercial route skips straight to a centrifuge: cream is spun out of the milk, churned into butter, and cooked. It is faster, it needs less milk, and it never involves curd at all.
Why the curd step matters
Setting milk into curd first means the milk has been fermented before any fat is separated. The makhan that comes off hand-churned curd smells different from cream butter, and it carries the buttermilk character through into the finished ghee. That is where the aroma people associate with home-made ghee comes from.
It is also slower and less efficient, which is the honest reason most producers do not do it.
What changes when the milk is buffalo milk
Buffalo milk carries substantially more fat than cow milk. In practice that means:
- More makhan per litre. Buffalo milk yields more butter, which is why buffalo ghee is usually the cheaper of the two per litre — ours is ₹1,899 a litre against ₹2,149 for desi cow ghee.
- A denser, creamier ghee. It sets firmer and feels heavier on the spoon than cow ghee.
- A white or pale cream colour, not golden. This surprises people, and it is completely normal — we explain why in why buffalo ghee is white.
- Better behaviour in sweets. The density is exactly what mithai, halwa and festive cooking want.
And then there is barosi
Bilona describes the churning. Barosi describes the cooking — and in North India the two go together.
Barosi means the makhan is cooked over dry cow-dung embers in a mitti ka bartan, an earthen pot, rather than over a gas flame in steel. The heat is low and even, and it comes at the pot from all sides. Our batches take seven to eight hours this way, against the twenty or thirty minutes a gas flame would need.
That long, gentle render is what produces the grain in the ghee and most of the aroma. Rush it and you get ghee, but you do not get that.
Is bilona buffalo ghee worth the price?
It depends what you are buying it for. If you want a neutral cooking fat, it is not worth paying for the process. If you are buying ghee for the aroma and the texture — for mithai, for parathas, for a spoon over dal — then the process is precisely the thing you are paying for.
What you should not do is pay a bilona price for cream-separated ghee. We look at how to tell the difference in bilona vs machine-made buffalo ghee.
What we do at Chahal Agri Farms
Our buffalo ghee is made in Singhpur Sani, Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh, from buffalo milk set into curd overnight, hand-churned in a wooden bilona, and slow-cooked seven to eight hours in an earthen pot over cow-dung embers. Small batches. No cream separator. No blending. Nothing added.
The full specification, batch numbers and NABL report references are on our product and testing information page.
