What the fuck? You’re telling me Indians don’t know enough about plant-based dishes?
What next, fishes can’t swim?
Replace butter and ghee with mustard oil, milk with coconut, and paneer with wheat gluten. Done. Time to go home.
Replacing ghee with mustard oil isn’t appropriate in every dish. Mustard oil has a spicy bitterness that doesn’t belong in traditional sweets usually made with ghee, for example. You could use coconut oil instead but now you’re introducing coconut aromatics which will change the whole character of the dish.
Freshly made ghee has the aroma of toasted marshmallows. To replace it you need to find something else with those qualities.
I don’t eat much sweets. In most savory dishes I’ve tried, mustard works just as well. We add mustard seeds to pretty much every dish anyway. For sweets, coconut is a good pick. It gives similar texture and mouth-feel, but has a pungent smell. Maybe dalda, but that shit’s infamous.
I never knowingly ate Ghee, but couldn’t you just caramelize some sugar and add that to your sweets in combination with any random, neutral oil (sunflower, canola, …)? Altenatively, you could use some sugar beet syrup or agave syrup. At least in my mind marshmallow taste isn’t super unique or hard to achieve.
Caramelized sugar is one part of the picture. Another part is Maillard reactions of milk proteins, which give ghee a nutty quality. Perhaps you could toast some nuts and include that as well.
You could also use an oil with such a flavor. Pumpkin seeds, hemp, roasted walnut, pistaccio etc.
Those oils may be quite hard to find, depending on what country you’re in.
