Curry Powder, Madras

A chili-forward curry powder with a southern edge — mustard seed and curry leaf as well as the usual coriander-and-cumin base. Fifteen minutes of work, and it is not close to the tin.

One thing about the name, since it comes up. “Madras” on a British curry-house menu is a HEAT GRADE, not a place’s recipe: the ladder korma, bhuna, madras, vindaloo, phall is a British restaurant convention invented to let customers order by tolerance. There is a real city — Chennai, formerly Madras — with a real and distinctive cuisine involving curry leaves, mustard seed, tamarind and coconut, and it bears only a loose relationship to what “a madras” means when you order one in Birmingham. This blend leans toward the city rather than the menu, which is why the curry leaf and mustard seed are in it.

Ingredients

The bulk

• 1/4 cup coriander seed

The body

• 2 Tbsp cumin seed
• 1 Tbsp black or brown mustard seed
• 1 Tbsp fenugreek seed
• 2 tsp black peppercorns
• 1 tsp fennel seed

Warm notes

• 1 in piece cinnamon or cassia, broken
• 6 green cardamom pods, seeds only
• 4 cloves

Fresh and dried

• 15-20 fresh curry leaves
• 6-10 dried red chilies, stemmed (Kashmiri for colour, árbol or Guntur for heat)

Ground, added off the heat

• 2 Tbsp ground turmeric
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp salt (optional — see Notes)

Directions

Key ingredients

Cinnamon · Black Pepper · Mustard · Turmeric

1. Toast the whole seeds first, and toast them in stages rather than all at once, because they do not cook at the same rate. Dry pan, medium heat, everything moving.
2. Start with coriander, cumin, fenugreek, fennel and peppercorns — 2-3 minutes, until they smell nutty and darken slightly.
3. Add the mustard seed, cinnamon, cardamom and cloves for the last 30-60 seconds. Mustard seed will start to pop; that is your signal to stop.
4. Then the chilies and curry leaves, about 30 seconds, just until the leaves go crisp and translucent and the chilies smell toasty. Watch these — chilies scorch fast and burnt chili is bitter and unfixable.
5. Tip everything out of the pan the moment it is done. A hot pan keeps working after the heat is off, and this is where most home spice blends get over-toasted.
6. Cool completely before grinding. Grinding warm spice releases oils that gum up the grinder and clump the powder. Five minutes on a plate is enough.
7. Grind fine in a spice grinder or a dedicated coffee grinder — a spare grinder kept only for spices is the best twenty dollars in this whole hobby.
8. Stir in the turmeric, ground ginger and salt off the heat. Turmeric is not toasted with the rest; it is already a dried, ground product and toasting it just makes it bitter.
9. Store in a sealed jar away from light. Use within three to six months — ground spice dies, and a curry powder that tastes of nothing is simply old.

Notes

Where it goes in the pan Curry powder is a BASE, not a finish. It is turmeric-forward and full of raw-tasting ground seed that needs heat and fat to become pleasant, so it goes in EARLY — bloomed in oil after the onions and the ginger-garlic, for 30-60 seconds until it darkens and smells cooked. Put it in at the end and the dish tastes chalky.

Garam masala is the opposite and goes in at the END. See that recipe for the full argument.

A period version, for perspective An 1895 English recipe for Madras curry powder reads: three pounds coriander seed, three-quarter pound “saffron,” three-quarter pound dry chillies, three-quarter pound pepper, three-quarter pound mustard seed, six ounces dry ginger, four ounces “vendium,” three-quarter pound salt, three-quarter pound sugar, six ounces cummin seed, quarter pound poppy seed, quarter pound mixed spices, and one pound dried pea flour.

Three things worth noticing. “Saffron” there almost certainly means TURMERIC — real saffron at that weight would have cost more than everything else combined many times over, and “Indian saffron” was a common name for it. “Vendium” is vendhayam, Tamil for FENUGREEK, written down by ear. And a pound of dried pea flour is a FILLER, about a ninth of the total, printed in a recipe presented as authentic — bulking agents in curry powder are not a modern supermarket sin.

Also notice that coriander is three pounds, by a distance the largest single item and more than three times anything else. That is the proportion I use here too, and it is why I call coriander the flour of a masala.

The salt Optional, and I have left it small. The 1895 blend carried three-quarters of a pound of salt AND the same of sugar, so a pre-seasoned powder has long precedent. But it makes the blend harder to use in a dish you are already salting, so I would leave it out if you cook by taste.

Buy whole, toast, grind Ground spice loses its volatile oils fast; whole seed keeps for a year or more with real potency. This is the single biggest quality difference available to a home cook and it costs nothing but a grinder.