Curry Leaves: What They Are, How They Taste, and Why They Have Nothing to Do With Curry Powder

Despite the name, curry leaves aren’t an ingredient in curry powder, and they come from an unrelated plant. They’re the aromatic leaves of the curry tree, a shrub native from the Indian subcontinent to southern China, and they smell citrusy, grassy and faintly sulfurous. In Indian cooking they usually go into hot oil at the start of a dish, where the fat captures their aroma and carries it into everything else.

At a glance

What curry leaves are

The curry tree is a medium-size flowering shrub in the Rutaceae, native to South and Southeast Asia, whose aromatic leaves are used extensively in Indian cooking. Kew’s Plants of the World Online now puts the species in the genus Bergera, as Bergera koenigii, and lists Murraya koenigii as a synonym. Most cookbooks and research papers still use the Murraya name.¹

Kew gives the native range as the Indian subcontinent to southern China (southern Yunnan and Guangdong), peninsular Malaysia and southern Hainan. It lists the tree as native to India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, among others, and as introduced in places including Java, Sumatra, Fiji, the Maldives and the Gulf States. It grows mainly in the wet tropics. That rules out two things you’ll often read: the tree isn’t confined to the Himalayan foothills, and migrants didn’t carry it to Malaysia, since Kew counts peninsular Malaysia as part of its native range.¹

Not related to curry powder

Curry powder is a ground spice blend. The USDA’s purchasing specification says it should include, but isn’t limited to, turmeric, coriander, fenugreek, cinnamon, cumin, black pepper, ginger and cardamom. Curry leaves aren’t on the list.⁴ Curry powder is a blend adapted by British settlers in India, and the word “curry” traces to the Tamil kari, “sauce”. Nik Sharma puts it plainly: curry leaves have nothing to do with curry, and a curry can exist without them.⁵ We found no source showing which commercial curry powders, if any, contain curry leaves. See curry powder and curry spices.

Flavor and aroma

Curry leaves give off a mix of citrusy, grassy and burnt, sulfur-like aromas that get stronger when the leaves are fried. Nik Sharma recommends fresh leaves whenever you can get them, because dried ones are less intense, and says to use more if you’re using dried.⁵

The compounds

We opened only a few analyses of the leaf oil. In one, leaves collected in June 2007 from trees on a research campus in Chittagong, Bangladesh, were air-dried for about a week and hydrodistilled. The oil made up 1.0% of the dried leaf and contained 39 compounds, led by 3-carene (54.2%) and caryophyllene (9.5%).³ That’s one sample from one site, so don’t read 54.2% as typical. In the same study, the leaf oil of a related species, Murraya paniculata, differed both in which compounds it had and in how much.

The leaves, roots and bark are also rich in carbazole alkaloids, a group that includes mahanimbine, koenimbine and girinimbine. Most of the pharmacological research on the plant is about these.⁶ No source we opened links them to the leaves’ flavor.

How curry leaves are used

The classic technique is tempering: frying the leaves in hot fat so the fat carries their aroma into the dish. Nik Sharma describes frying them in hot oil until crisp and translucent, then using the oil to flavor a dish, and notes that the fat (ghee, coconut oil, olive oil) captures the aroma.⁵

• Dal and grains. Dal, cooked grains, seafood and meat all take a curry leaf tempering.
• Rasam. Rasam is a peppery, tamarind-soured South Indian soup. In Smita Chandra’s version, published by Saveur, mustard seeds, cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds, curry leaves and dried chiles cook in hot oil until the seeds pop, and that oil gets stirred into the soup.⁷
• Powder. Fresh leaf powder and the leaf oil are also used to season food.

Mustard seeds, as in the rasam above, are a natural partner. Asafoetida is another frequent one, though we didn’t open a source to back that up. For more ideas, see curry leaves uses and cooking with curry leaves; for mustard seeds, see black mustard seeds.

Buying and storage

Choose fresh over dried. We found no regulator or standards body with shelf-life or storage guidance for curry leaves. You can freeze fresh sprigs, but no source we opened tests how well the aroma survives.

Safety

EU import controls. When the EU set out its rules for stepped-up checks on high-risk imports in October 2019, it put curry leaves (Bergera/Murraya koenigii, fresh, chilled, frozen or dried) from India on its list of goods subject to special conditions because of pesticide residues, with identity and physical checks on 20% of consignments.⁸ That list gets amended regularly, and we didn’t check whether curry leaves from India are still on the current version.

Health claims

Curry leaves often get credit for protecting the liver, fighting cancer and treating diarrhea. A 2020 review of the plant’s pharmacology says only limited studies have evaluated its medicinal efficacy and calls for more work in cell and animal models. Most of the research it summarizes is lab and animal work, not human trials.⁶ The NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health has no fact sheet on curry leaves.⁹ We make no claim that curry leaves treat or prevent anything. The review describes the leaves as a significant source of several vitamins, but we found no figure for how much a typical dish gives you.

Substitutes and comparisons

Nothing tastes quite like curry leaves. If dried leaves are all you have, Sharma suggests using more.⁵ See curry leaf substitutes and curry leaves vs. bay leaves, which people often confuse even though they’re unrelated.

Related pages

• Curry powder
• Asafoetida
• Black mustard seeds
• Indian spices
• Bay leaves