Butter vs Makhan

For many of us ‘butter’ is an english word for ‘makhan’ (मक्खन).

But have you ever realised that whenever you hear the word ‘butter’ the first image that strike to our mind is of utterly butterly delicious yellow salted butter. While when we hear makhan an image of Lord Krishna with makhan in his hand and all over his face strike to our mind. So just like their impression these are actually two different products which are misunderstood to be one or the same. In reality the normal yellow salty butter that we generally get in market is ‘pasteurized butter’ while makhan is ‘cultured butter’.

Before talking about which one is good or bad let us understand the process how butter and makhan are derived from milk.

To make Makhan, desi gir cow milk is fermented to dahi (curd). After getting dahi, it is churned to and fro with wodden bilona at low speed so that makhan and butter milk (chhach) get separated from dahi. Makhan start floating over butter milk which is collected, washed and stored.

To make Butter, raw milk (mostly buffalo milk as it has high fat) is processed in cream separator to separate cream from milk and then pasteurization of cream is done. This pasteurized cream goes through high speed metallic churning to separate butter and butter milk from cream. After it butter is blended with salt and artificial colour to get that standard yellow salty butter

Now you may think that these are just two ways of making same thing how are they different? So here are the points of difference to be noted:

The most important point of difference is probiotics ( probiotics are healthy bacteria and yeast). For making makkhan the base material is dahi which is rich in probiotics. These probiotics play very important role in boosting immunity and keeping our digestive system healthy. While base material to make butter is raw milk which does not contains probiotics. On the top of that cream separated from raw milk is further pasteurized that kills all the bacteria. So probiotics are completely missing in butter.

If you notice about churning in both the process you will find that in butter making churning is done at high speed with metallic churners which increase the processing temperature. Due to this heat butter loose many of the temperature sensitive vitamins and minerals and this heat also change the structure and nature of fatty acids making them harmful for health. While in makhan making churning is done at low speed with wooden bilona to minimize process heat and keeping the nutrients intact.

Therefore always keep in mind that makhan and butter are not the same. In ayurveda makhan has given a very special status because of its supreme health benefits to human health. We will try to come up with benefits of makhan in our next post. Hope this post would have given you some new insights about milk and milk products, if you liked it and found it useful do share it with your friends and contribute in creating awareness about traditional Indian food wisdom.