Panch Phoran: Bengal’s Five Whole Spices and How to Temper With Them

The panch phoran recipe you’ll see printed most often isn’t the one Bengali cooks use. This mix of five whole seeds from eastern India and Bangladesh (also written panch phoron or paanch phoron) usually appears as equal parts nigella, fenugreek, cumin, black mustard and fennel seed. In Bengal, cooks use a local seed, radhuni, and which spice it replaces depends on who you ask.¹² The name means “five spices,” and however you build it, the seeds get fried whole in hot oil before use: in Bengal, almost always mustard oil.

At a glance

What is in it

All the sources agree on whole seeds in equal amounts, but not on which five. Gernot Katzer notes that the mix most often given in the literature is whole nigella, fenugreek, cumin, black mustard and fennel in equal parts, and that this isn’t the authentic recipe: in Bengal, cooks use radhuni.¹

So radhuni replaces cumin in the Bong Eats recipe and mustard in the version Down To Earth describes. Katzer says black mustard usually takes radhuni’s place outside Bengal.¹ Bong Eats says cumin is an acceptable substitute if you can’t get radhuni.³ Celery seed sometimes gets suggested as a radhuni stand-in elsewhere, but none of the sources we checked for this page gives it.

Radhuni is Trachyspermum roxburghianum, sometimes called wild celery, and it’s specific to Bengali cooking. Down To Earth says it adds an intense grassy taste the other four spices don’t have.²

Name

Panch phoron literally means five spices, used in tempering. Panch is five. We couldn’t trace the explanations that tie the number to the five elements of Hindu cosmology to a source, so we’re leaving them out.

Flavor and the compounds behind it

Once fried, the mix tastes nutty, bittersweet and faintly anise-like. Here’s what the sources say about each seed:

Katzer sums up the effect as a subtle, harmonious flavor, mostly in vegetable and fish dishes.

How to use it

Tempering. Panch phoran is always fried in oil before use, and Bengali cooks almost always use mustard oil. Black mustard seeds in general get fried in fat or dry-toasted before use. Frying changes the mustard, too: fried or toasted mustard seeds lose their pungency and turn nutty and smoky.

Dishes. Bong Eats uses it in dals, vegetables, chutneys and pickles, including kacha moog-mosur dal, kochurir alur torkari and amra’r chutney.³ Down To Earth’s recipe for shukto, the Bengali mixed-vegetable dish, calls for panch phoron with radhuni, and a chef it quotes uses radhuni for tempering lentils and in fish.² Katzer names vegetables and fish as its main uses.

You could grind the mix for a dry rub. It breaks with the whole-seed tradition, but it can work.

Buying and making it

We didn’t find a standard for panch phoran. Check the label to see whether the blend uses radhuni, mustard or cumin. To make your own, mix equal measures of the five seeds. Bong Eats uses a tablespoon of each.³

Storage

Keep it in an airtight container. No source gives a shelf life.

Safety

Mustard allergy. Mustard is one of the 14 allergens UK food businesses must declare.⁹ It isn’t among the nine major allergens in US labeling law.¹⁰

Fenugreek. The NIH’s NCCIH says fenugreek is believed to be safe for adults and children in the amounts commonly found in foods.¹¹

Lead in spices generally. A New York City review of 1,496 spice samples collected from 2008 to 2017 found detectable lead in more than half.¹² The abstract doesn’t break results out by product.

Health claims

Fenugreek, cumin and nigella are often said to help control blood sugar. For fenugreek, the best-studied of the three, NCCIH says some research suggests it may lower blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes, but many of the studies weren’t high quality.¹¹ We found no study of panch phoran itself, and we’re not making any treatment claims for it.

Substitutes and comparisons

• Panch phoran substitutes
• The five seeds: nigella seeds, fenugreek, cumin, black mustard seeds, fennel seed
• Swaps and comparisons for the seeds: nigella seeds substitute, black mustard seed substitute, fenugreek vs fennel seed, fennel seeds vs cumin seeds, cumin seeds vs ground cumin, too much fenugreek
• Mustard seed uses, cooking with fenugreek
• A ground Indian blend for contrast: garam masala