Why Ghee and Coconut Oil Are Indian and Southeast Asian Cooking Traditions

 Asian cooking has a seed oil problem that most food writing refuses to address directly. Walk into a Chinese, Japanese, Thai or Vietnamese restaurant outside Asia and the food is almost certainly cooked in canola oil or vegetable oil. The dishes look authentic. The flavours are approximations. The fat is entirely wrong.

Traditional Chinese cooking used lard. Traditional Japanese cooking used lard and fish fat. Traditional Indian cooking used ghee. Traditional Southeast Asian cooking used coconut oil. Traditional Korean cooking used sesame oil as a finishing fat and lard for frying. Every one of these ancestral fats was replaced — gradually, across the second half of the 20th century — by cheap imported seed oils that produced inferior results and introduced industrial polyunsaturated fats into food cultures that had never consumed them.

This is the guide to what traditional Asian cooking fats actually are and how to use them.

Lard — The Traditional Fat of Chinese Cooking

Lard is the most important ancestral fat in Chinese cooking. Historically, Chinese home cooking used rendered pork fat for stir frying, dumpling making, and as a flavour base for countless dishes. The wok hei — that distinctive smoky, charred quality of great Chinese cooking — is achieved at extremely high temperatures with a fat that can handle that heat without breaking down. Lard handles wok cooking at high heat better than any seed oil.

The shift from lard to vegetable oil in Chinese cooking was not driven by nutritional evidence — it was driven by the economics of industrial food production and the marketing of seed oils as a healthier alternative. According to PubMed research, lard is approximately 45% monounsaturated fat — the same category as olive oil — with a remaining fat profile of stable saturated fats and a relatively small polyunsaturated fraction. It is chemically far more stable at wok temperatures than canola or vegetable oil.

Use lard for all high-heat Chinese cooking — stir fries, fried rice, dumplings and steamed buns. The flavour difference is immediately apparent. Browse our full Asian recipes collection for dishes that use lard correctly.

Ghee and Coconut Oil — Indian and Southeast Asian Traditions

Indian cooking has used ghee as its primary cooking fat for over 5,000 years — for every tarka, every curry base, every dal finish, every rice preparation. The nutritional and flavour superiority of ghee over seed oils in Indian cooking is not debatable — it is demonstrable in every dish. The fat-soluble compounds in Indian spice blends — turmeric, cumin, fenugreek, mustard seeds — are activated by ghee in a way that water-based or seed oil cooking cannot replicate.

Coconut oil is the foundational fat of Southeast Asian cooking — Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka all have deep culinary traditions built on coconut fat. Coconut oil's medium-chain triglycerides are metabolised differently from long-chain fatty acids in seed oils, and its high saturated fat content makes it one of the most stable cooking fats for the high-heat applications common in Southeast Asian cooking. According to Healthline, coconut oil's lauric acid content supports immune function and antimicrobial activity — properties entirely absent from polyunsaturated seed oils. For 30+ Asian recipes cooked in lard, ghee and coconut oil, Savor Asia is the complete collection.

Sesame Oil — The Finishing Fat of East Asian Cooking

Toasted sesame oil is not a cooking fat in the traditional sense — it is a finishing fat. Its smoke point is too low for high-heat cooking and its flavour is too dominant for use as a cooking medium. Used as it was always intended — a few drops added to a finished dish, a drizzle over a bowl of ramen, a dash in a Korean bibimbap — toasted sesame oil is one of the most powerful flavour elements in Asian cooking.

The key distinction is between cold-pressed toasted sesame oil — a traditional finishing fat with genuine flavour — and refined sesame oil used as a cooking medium, which loses the flavour compounds that make sesame oil valuable and oxidises at cooking temperatures like other polyunsaturated oils. Use toasted sesame oil exclusively as a finishing fat, off the heat, in small quantities. Cook everything else in lard, ghee or coconut oil.

Fish Fat and Duck Fat in Asian Cooking

Japanese cooking has historically used fish-based fats — the rendered fat from fatty fish used to finish dishes, the schmaltz-like quality of certain traditional preparations. Duck fat is used extensively in certain Chinese regional cuisines, particularly in preparations that would otherwise call for lard. Both are ancestral animal fats with stable fat profiles well suited to their traditional applications.

The Weston A. Price Foundation documented in its research across traditional Asian populations that communities consuming their ancestral fats — lard, ghee, coconut oil, animal fats — had dramatically lower rates of the metabolic diseases associated with seed oil consumption that appeared in the same populations after industrialisation and dietary westernisation. For more on this topic read our complete guide to what seed oils are and why they cause harm.

The MAHA Asian Kitchen

A MAHA Asian kitchen is simply a return to what Asian cooking was before seed oils. Lard for Chinese stir fries. Ghee for Indian curries. Coconut oil for Thai and Indonesian cooking. Toasted sesame as a finishing fat only. Animal fats where the tradition calls for them. Zero canola, zero vegetable oil, zero soybean oil throughout. The food tastes better. The fat profile is healthier. And the tradition is restored. For more seed oil free Asian cooking, also explore Savor India for the complete Indian ghee cooking tradition.

Asian cooking at its traditional best has always been MAHA cooking. The fats just need to be restored. Follow The Foodie Kitchen at All Links — and find us on Instagram and X.