The First Batch: Two Days in Sherpura, Banaskantha | Originary Originary Oils A2 Ghee Honey Spices Test reports The first batch. We went to Sherpura, in Banaskantha, to watch our A2 ghee made from the animal to the jar. Hand-milked before dawn, set overnight with yesterday's curd, churned in a wooden bilona, simmered slow. Fourteen hours, most of them spent waiting. Originary Journal · Where it comes from · 9 minute read Hands on it Waiting One batch, as we watched it. Roughly ten of those fourteen hours are the milk sitting still, culturing overnight and cooling. There is no version of this that goes faster. The road in The last stretch into Sherpura does not announce itself. The highway thins to two lanes, the two lanes thin to a single ribbon of tarmac with dust on both shoulders, and then you are driving with the windows down because the air outside is better than anything the car can do. Banaskantha is not the Gujarat most people picture. It is flat and wide, and in the evening the light arrives sideways and turns everything the colour of unfiltered honey. Cattle walk home along the edge of the road with the unhurried confidence of animals who know the route better than the driver does. Nobody moves them along. They arrive when they arrive. We had come to check one thing: whether the ghee we wanted to put our name on was made the way we had been told it was made. You cannot verify that over a phone call. You have to stand in the room while it happens. Sherpura A village in Banaskantha district, North Gujarat. Dry, flat, and one of the oldest dairying belts in the country. Add the nearest town and approximate distance from Ahmedabad We were fed before we were allowed to ask anything This is worth saying plainly, because it shaped the whole visit. In Banaskantha a guest is not a visitor. There is a charpai pulled into the shade before you have finished getting out of the car. There is tea. There is a second cup of tea you did not ask for. There is a quiet, absolute insistence that you eat, and a mild offence taken if you eat lightly. Within an hour we had stopped feeling like buyers doing diligence and started feeling like people who had turned up at a relative's house unannounced and been forgiven for it. It is easy to write that off as colour. It is not. How a family treats a stranger tells you a great deal about how they treat everything else in their care, including their animals. Editor note: add the host family's name here, and one specific thing you were fed. A single concrete detail does more than a paragraph of warmth. Atithi The guest is treated as an obligation to be honoured, not a person to be hosted. In practice it means you do not get to refuse the second cup. The Rabari Banaskantha is Rabari country. The Rabari are pastoralists, and herding is not a job they took up. It is the organising fact of the community, carried across generations and a lot of very dry land. You see it before anyone explains it. In the men's white dhoti and turban. In the women's dark odhni worked with embroidery and mirror. In the way conversation keeps circling back to the animals without ever being about the animals. What struck us most was the vocabulary. Nobody in that village talks about a cow as a unit of production. They talk about her the way you would talk about someone in the household who is having a good week or a difficult one. Her temperament. Her appetite. Whether the heat is bothering her. Which of the herd she chooses to stand next to. We came looking for a supply chain. What we found first was a relationship that had been running for generations, into which we were the newcomers asking for a place. Kankrej The indigenous cattle breed native to Banaskantha and Kutch, and one of the breeds whose milk carries the A2 beta-casein variant. Confirm the breed of this specific herd before publishing 4:40 in the morning Milking starts before there is anything you would reasonably call light. The calf goes first. That is the traditional practice here. The calf is allowed to suckle, the milk lets down, and only then does the milking begin. It is slower than the alternative. Nobody in Sherpura seems interested in the alternative. Anshu, our co-founder, asked if he could try. This is the part of the trip that has become a running joke in our team chat. For the record: hand milking looks like the easiest thing in the world and is not. There is a rhythm to it, a squeeze that starts at the top and rolls down, both hands alternating, steady enough that the animal stays calm. Anshu got about four minutes in before his forearms gave up and the milking was taken over by someone with the expression of a professional watching an enthusiastic amateur. But he got milk in the pail. And he understood, in a way no supplier deck would ever have taught him, how much human labour sits behind one morning's collection. 4.40 The morning milking begins in the dark. The calf is allowed to feed first, which is slower and is the reason the animals stay calm through it. The glass Someone handed us a steel glass of milk still warm from the animal, with a collar of foam on top. It surprised us. It was sweet. Not sweetened, but sweet the way corn is sweet when you eat it standing in the field. Thicker on the tongue than we expected, and faintly grassy at the end. That is a thing you do once, at the source, in the shed it came from, and we are not going to turn it into a recommendation. But it recalibrated something. Every glass of milk any of us had drunk before that morning had been a copy of a copy. What actually happens to the milk Here is the process as we watched it, over about fourteen hours. The step most commercial ghee skips is number four. EveningThe milk is boiled The day's collection goes straight onto the flame, then off it to cool to somewhere around body temperature. Nothing is measured with an instrument. It is measured with a finger and about thirty years of doing it. Just afterYesterday's curd goes in A spoonful of the previous day's curd is stirred through as the culture. The vessel is covered and left alone. This is the same living culture carried forward day after day, which is why no two households produce quite the same thing. Overnight, about 8 hoursIt sets, and nobody touches it The longest step in the process is the one where nothing visible happens. By morning the curd has set thick enough to hold the shape of a spoon. Morning, about 45 minutesChurned in the bilona A wooden churn on a vertical spindle, worked back and forth by a rope pulled hand over hand. This is the step most ghee skips, because you can reach butterfat far faster by separating cream out of milk with a machine. The sound changes as it goes, from a dull slosh to something lighter and more broken. ThenThe makkhan is lifted off by hand The buttermilk separates and the butter rises, pale and cloud-like, and gets lifted out. The buttermilk does not go to waste. It goes back into the household kitchen the same morning. About 90 minutesSimmered on a low flame The butter goes into a heavy-bottomed vessel over a low flame, and the flame stays low. This is the discipline of the whole thing. Rush it and you scorch the milk solids and lock a burnt note into the batch. Hold it and the water leaves slowly, the solids sink and toast, the liquid clarifies, and somewhere in the middle of that the smell arrives. Last, 10 minutesStrained warm into the jar Through cloth, still hot, golden and completely clear going in. It sets grainy as it cools. Those small crystals are what slow, unhurried cooling gives you, and they are now the first thing we look for in a batch. There is no polite way to describe what that smell does to a room. It gets into your clothes, and you find it there again two days later on the train home, and it makes you unreasonably happy. Editor note: the clock times in the hero timeline and the durations above are indicative, taken from what we observed on the day. Confirm the actual times with the household and correct both the STAGES list in the script and the durations here before publishing. An approximate number that is honest beats a round number that is not. Then we signed something The least cinematic part of the trip was the most important one. Before we left, we sat down and put an agreement on paper. What we buy, what we pay, on what terms, and for how long. Signed by both sides. A handshake in a village where you have just been fed and housed feels like enough. It is not, and not because anyone's word is in doubt. A written agreement is what turns a good visit into something a family can plan around. It means predictable offtake, a price that does not move with whoever showed up that week, and no layer of intermediaries deciding after the fact what the milk was worth. We would rather be the boring buyer with the paperwork than the charming one who disappears. Signed A fixed-term supply agreement covering volume, price and duration, held by both sides. Add the term length if you are comfortable publishing it Four things you can only check by standing there Every one of these is a claim someone could make from an office. None of them can be confirmed from one. 1 That the churn is real A wooden bilona and a rope, not a cream separator with traditional written on the label. 2 That the flame stays low Heat is where the shortcut lives. You can hear a rushed batch before you taste it. 3 That the herd is the herd A2 is a sourcing claim wearing a product label. It is verified at the animal, not in the jar. 4 That nobody left the room Start to finish, one batch, no container arriving from somewhere else halfway through. What this costs you Everything above has a price attached. If we only listed the good parts, this page would be doing what the rest of the shelf does. What you give up Why Batch-to-batch variation A living culture, seasonal fodder and a hand-judged flame produce a range, not a constant. Colour and aroma shift through the year. Perfectly identical ghee across every batch is a factory achievement. A grainy set Slow cooling forms crystals. It is not a fault and it is not a sign of anything added. Warm the jar slightly and it goes smooth. A higher price Churning curd to butter yields less fat per litre of milk than machine separation, and takes hours of someone's morning. There is no version of this that costs the same. Limited quantity Output is capped by one herd and one household's working day. When a batch runs out, it runs out. About this piece Written after a visit to Sherpura, Banaskantha in [month, year]. Process details are as observed on site. Timings are indicative. Photographs by [credit]. Published [date]. This is the jar that came back with us Milk from a herd in Sherpura, milked by hand at dawn by a family that has kept cattle for longer than any of us have been alive. Set overnight with yesterday's culture. Churned on a rope. Simmered slow. Strained warm. Sealed. We know, because we stood there and watched it happen. Shop the Sherpura batch See batch test reports Originary · This article describes sourcing and processing methods. It is not medical or dietary advice.