The authentic taste of Banaras

Banaras is one of the oldest living cities in the world, and it eats like one. Mornings begin on the ghats with kachori-sabzi and jalebi lifted straight out of a street-side kadhai. By noon the lanes smell of mustard oil hitting a hot pan. Almost every home keeps a barni of aachar on the terrace, a pot of dahi setting overnight and a tin of ghee that nobody bothers to measure.

None of it is complicated. It is simply done properly: the right oil, pressed the right way. Milk turned slowly into ghee. Rice left the way it grew.

Why we started

Most of what fills a kitchen shelf today has been made for the shelf, not for the kitchen. Oil is solvent-extracted, bleached and deodorised until it tastes of nothing. Rice is polished white. Ghee is made fast.

Banaras Foods exists to put the older way back on the shelf. We have started with oil, because oil is where almost every Indian dish begins, and because the difference between cold-pressed and refined is one you can see, smell and taste the moment you open the bottle.

What we make

Our cold-pressed oils are each pressed from a single ingredient and bottled as they come off the press: sesame, groundnut, black mustard, coconut, almond and kalonji. No solvents. No bleaching. No deodorising. No preservatives. Nothing added.

A2 ghee, fresh paneer, traditional aachar and unpolished Punjab basmati are next.

How we work

• Small batches, so what reaches you is fresh.
• One ingredient per oil, declared on the label.
• Nothing hidden. Every bottle carries a full nutrition panel and our FSSAI licence numbers.
• If something isn't right when it arrives, we put it right. Call or write to us.