Cooking With Curry Leaves: How to Temper and Use Them

Despite the name, curry leaves have nothing to do with curry powder. They come from the curry tree, and Indian cooks use them constantly. Fry them in fat first: their flavor compounds are mostly oil-soluble, which is why they usually go into hot oil before anything else.¹ Fried briefly, they turn crisp, smell stronger, and stay right in the dish. Get the fat, the timing and the amount right, and all that’s left is picking a dish.

At a glance

Question	Short answer
Fresh or dried?	Fresh. Dried leaves lose their fragrance soon after drying.
Basic technique	Fry lightly in oil or butter, at the start of a dish or as a tempering poured on at the end.
How many?	ATK needed 8 to 10 leaves where some recipes call for 3 or 4.¹ Saveur’s rasam uses 15.²
Eat or remove?	They are tender enough to eat.
Classic partners	Mustard seeds, cumin, fenugreek, dried chiles; asafoetida in the same pot.
Storage	Fridge for a short time; freezing is better, up to a month per ATK.³¹

Why fat comes first

America’s Test Kitchen explains that heating curry leaves in fat helps draw out their flavor compounds, which are mostly oil-soluble, and that the leaves usually get a light fry in oil or butter before the other ingredients go in.¹ Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages says the leaves taste best after a short heating.³ Nik Sharma fries them in hot oil until they turn crisp and translucent, and notes that they smell stronger as they fry.⁴

Fried this way, Katzer writes, the leaves keep their dark green color and fragrance and turn pleasantly crisp.³

Two ways to temper

Indian cooks use curry leaves at either end of a recipe.

At the start. The leaves are fried in butter or oil as part of the spice mix that opens a dish.³ ATK describes the same order: leaves into the fat before the other ingredients.¹

At the end. In South India they often go into a tempering that flavors a dish after it’s cooked, just before serving.³ Katzer calls this a tarka-like preparation. Here’s how it runs in two published recipes:

Recipe	Fat	What goes in, in order	When it meets the dish
Smita Chandra’s rasam (Saveur)²	Oil	Mustard, cumin and fenugreek seeds, curry leaves and chiles de árbol, cooked until the seeds pop	Stirred into the finished soup
Bincy Lenin’s simple sambar (Onmanorama)⁵	Coconut oil	Mustard and fenugreek seeds spluttered first, then dried chiles, curry leaves and a little sambar powder	Added after the sambar comes off the stove

The sambar puts the seeds in first and the leaves after them. The rasam puts everything in together and calls it done when the seeds pop. Either way, you take your cue from the seeds, not the leaves.

Whatever the order, the leaves stay in. The tempering, oil and all, goes into the dish. Katzer notes that curry leaves are never removed before serving and are perfectly safe to eat,³ and ATK says they’re tender enough to eat, though you can take them out if you’d rather.¹

What goes with curry leaves

In named recipes, their partners are the seeds fried alongside them: black mustard, cumin and fenugreek, plus dried chiles. In the Onmanorama sambar, asafoetida cooks with the dal in the pressure cooker while the curry leaves go into the final tempering, so the two share a dish without sharing a pan. Coconut oil is the fat in that recipe.⁵ For the seeds, see black mustard seeds and cooking with fenugreek.

Dishes that use curry leaves

Dish or use	Where	Source
Thin lentil and vegetable curries	South India	Katzer³
Dry curries of vegetables sautéed with spices	South India	Katzer³
Rice dishes such as bisi bele bath	South India	Katzer³
Rasam, a peppery tamarind soup	South India	Saveur²
Sambar, served with rice, idli or dosa	South India (recipe from a Kerala publication)	Onmanorama⁵
Masoor dal (red lentils)	ATK test	ATK¹
Samosa stuffings	North India	Katzer;³ ATK tested a potato samosa filling¹
Chicken and beef curries, kottu roti, buriyani with crisp fried leaves	Sri Lanka	Katzer³
Dal, cooked grains, seafood, meat	General	Sharma⁴

Katzer notes that South Indian cooking is mainly vegetarian, so curry leaves there show up mostly in vegetable and lentil dishes, while Sri Lankan cooks also put them in meat curries. He also says you rarely find them outside the Indian sphere of influence.³ That’s about tradition, not a rule. Sharma’s list of grains, seafood and meat is broad enough to start from if you want to try them elsewhere.⁴

How many leaves

Recipes are all over the place.

Source	Amount	Context
America’s Test Kitchen¹	8 to 10 leaves	What its testers needed, against the 3 or 4 some recipes call for
Saveur (Smita Chandra)²	15 fresh or frozen leaves	One pot of rasam
Onmanorama (Bincy Lenin)⁵	“As needed”	Sambar for a ½ cup of dal

Ratio (Attributed): If a recipe gives no number, start with ATK’s 8 to 10 leaves for one pot of dal and adjust next time.

Fresh vs dried

Use fresh leaves whenever you can. Katzer says dried curry leaves lose their delicate fragrance soon after drying,³ and Sharma finds dried leaves less intense than fresh.

Ratio (Attributed): If dried is all you’ve got, Sharma says doubling the amount is the safer bet.⁴ That’s his rule of thumb, not a measured ratio. We found no source that tested dried leaves in hot oil, so we can’t say whether they go into a tempering at the same moment as fresh.

Storing fresh leaves

Keep them on the stem. Katzer advises against pulling the leaves off their stems until you use them.³
Fridge, briefly. Curry leaves keep in the fridge for a while, but Katzer says they keep better frozen.³ We found no source that gives a number of days.
Freezer. ATK says to freeze fresh leaves in a zipper-lock bag for up to a month to hold onto their flavor.¹ Saveur’s rasam takes fresh or frozen leaves interchangeably.²
Dried leaves. The usual spice advice applies: a tightly covered container, away from air, light, moisture and heat, all of which speed flavor and color loss.⁶

Common confusion

Curry leaves have nothing to do with curry powder, rarely appear in it, and can’t stand in for it.¹ See curry leaves vs. bay leaves for the other common mix-up, and curry leaf substitutes if you can’t find any.

Not yet measured

How many days fresh curry leaves keep in a home refrigerator.
How frozen leaves compare with fresh in strength, and how long they keep beyond ATK’s month.
How dried leaves behave in a tempering compared with fresh.

Fresh Curry Leaves, America’s Test Kitchen. americastestkitchen.com · Publication ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹
“Smita Chandra’s Rasam (Spicy Tamarind Soup)”, Saveur, 2015. saveur.com · Publication ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Curry Leaves, Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages. gernot-katzers-spice-pages.com · Reference work ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵
Nik Sharma, “A Guide to Curry Leaves”, Nik Sharma Cooks, 2022. niksharmacooks.com · Publication ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Bincy Lenin, “Simple sambar”, Onmanorama, 2021. onmanorama.com · Publication ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Add a Little Spice to Your Life! Part II, University of California Cooperative Extension, 2002. ucanr.edu · Reference work ↩

Also drawn on

Curry tree (Frannie Comstock), Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com

Cooking With Curry Leaves: Tempering, Dishes, Amounts and Storage