Cooking With Curry Powder: Bloom It, Read the Label, Match the Dish

Dump curry powder straight into the pot and, as America’s Test Kitchen puts it, you get a curry with a bland, musty flavor.¹ The fix is one step: cook it in fat before any liquid goes in. That’s the biggest difference between a flat curry and a good one. After that, it’s about reading the label. Turmeric usually comes first, and a blend is only hot if it lists chile.

At a glance

Bloom it in fat first

ATK’s method for curry powder, chili powder and other ground spices has three steps. Sauté fresh aromatics like onions in fat. Cook the curry powder in that fat. Then add the liquid and bring everything to a simmer. ATK explains that many of the flavor compounds in spices are fat-soluble, which is why heating them in fat brings out their flavor.¹

Watch the pan. ATK says ground spices burn fairly quickly and taste scorched,¹ and NPR’s guide to Indian tempering is blunt: there’s no saving a burned tempering.⁶ If the powder scorches, wipe out the pan and do that step again.

Recipes vary on timing:

What about mixing it with liquid first?

You’ll see a tip to stir curry powder into yogurt, coconut milk or stock before it goes into the dish. We found no tested source for doing that in place of blooming, and ATK’s method adds the liquid after the powder has cooked in fat.¹ Some cooks wet the powder into a paste so it’s less likely to scorch.

Long simmering changes the blend

Once the liquid is in, a curry usually simmers, and that matters for at least one spice in the blend. A 1992 study of household cooking found that black pepper’s pungent compound, piperine, dropped by 50 to 60% when pepper was boiled for 15 to 30 minutes as part of a curry powder blend.⁸ That’s one lab study, which we read only as an abstract, and it measured one compound. It suggests a long-simmered curry loses some pepper bite. It doesn’t mean curry powder needs long cooking.

Read the label

Ingredient order tells you proportions. US labels list ingredients in descending order of predominance by weight,⁹ so the first ingredient is the biggest.

Turmeric usually leads. The USDA’s purchasing specification lists turmeric first among the ingredients curry powder should include, followed by coriander, fenugreek, cinnamon, cumin, black pepper, ginger and cardamom, and says the list isn’t limited to those. Turmeric is first on both Jamaican labels we checked.⁴⁵ A turmeric-heavy blend isn’t a tasteless one. Turmeric’s own taste is described as bitter, slightly acrid, yet sweet, and USDA expects curry powder to taste warm and bitter.³ You’ll read that a blend with turmeric listed first will be bland; we found no source that tests that.

Heat depends on chile. The USDA list has no chile in it.³ Grace’s mild Jamaican powder lists none either, while Blue Mountain’s lists cayenne.⁴⁵ Madras powders have a reputation for heat. Julia Fine describes 19th-century recipes “laden with turmeric, chili, and/or cayenne,”¹⁰ yet World Spice Merchants rates its own Madras blend only 2 out of 5 for heat.¹¹ The only reliable signal is chile, cayenne or red pepper in the ingredient list. See is curry powder spicy?.

Choose the style for the dish

There’s never been one fixed combination of spices in curry powder.¹² Two styles differ in ways that change a dish. For others, see Japanese curry powder and Malaysian curry powder.

Where curry powder fits

Curry powder is a natural fit for dishes that grew up around it. Mulligatawny is one. The Christian Science Monitor describes it as a soup created to cater to officers of the British Raj and says you can make it with commercial curry powder.¹³ Jamaican curries are another, built on Jamaican curry powder, as in Hank Shaw’s curry shrimp.⁷ In India, spice mixtures are called masala and made at home. For a regional Indian recipe that names its own spices, use the spices it names. For the blend Indian cooks do keep on hand, see garam masala vs. curry powder.

Making your own

The Spice House publishes a toasted curry powder made from whole coriander, cumin, black pepper, long pepper, fenugreek, brown mustard, cloves, fennel, dill seed, dried chiles, mace, Ceylon cinnamon, cardamom and grains of paradise. They’re toasted in a dry pan over medium heat for about 3 minutes until fragrant and nutty, then cooled, ground and sifted. Ground turmeric and ginger go in only after the whole spices are ground, so they never get toasted. The merchant says toasting warms the spices and releases essential oils.²

Those are one merchant’s figures for one recipe, not a tested shelf life.

How much to use

There’s no standard amount, because no two blends are the same.¹²

Ratio (Attributed): The Spice House’s 1 to 2 teaspoons per serving is a reasonable place to start with a homemade blend.² With a store-bought blend that lists chile or cayenne, start at the low end and taste after the curry has simmered. If you overshoot, see too much curry powder.

Not yet measured

• Whether mixing curry powder with liquid before cooking improves or harms flavor compared with blooming in fat.
• How turmeric’s share in a blend affects how strongly a finished curry tastes.
• A home shelf life for store-bought curry powder measured on curry powder rather than spices in general.

Related

• Curry powder
• Too much curry powder
• Is curry powder spicy?
• Curry paste vs. curry powder
• Garam masala vs. curry powder
• Turmeric vs. curry powder
• Madras curry powder substitute