Jamaican · Sauce
Jamaican Curry Powder
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with an earthy, grounding base, char used as punctuation, on a slow, honest burn.
Ingredients
- 40 g coriander seed
- 20 g cumin seed
- 15 g fenugreek seed
- 10 g yellow mustard seed
- 10 g pimento berries
- 5 g black peppercorns
- 60 g ground turmeric
- 10 g ground ginger
- 5 g dried scotch bonnet or bird pepper
The skills inside
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts
Allergen screen
Found: mustard
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Toast the coriander, cumin, fenugreek, mustard and pimento in a dry pan over medium heat, shaking constantly, until the coriander is one shade darker and the mustard seeds begin to hop. Pull the pan while it still smells of maple, not of burnt sugar.
- Tip everything onto a cold plate and leave until completely cool; warm seed grinds to a smear rather than a powder.
- Grind with the peppercorns and dried pepper to a fine dust, then sift and regrind the tailings.
- Stir in the turmeric and ground ginger without toasting them, and store airtight in the dark.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts 70 recipes
- A single layer on dry metal with nothing added: no fat, and nothing else sharing the pan or the tray and competing for the heat.
- It is kept moving: shaken, stirred, or turned. Anything left still scorches on the face touching the metal while the rest of it is barely warm.
- It is judged by smell before sight: once it is fragrant there are seconds left, not minutes, and the nose reaches that point well before the colour does.
- It leaves the pan the instant it is done, onto a cold surface. A hot pan keeps toasting whatever stays in it, and carryover here is the difference between done and ruined.
- The colour is even and light rather than patchy, with nothing black at the edges: one scorched piece taints the whole quantity it is ground into.
Where it goes wrong It was left alone for a moment while something else was attended to. Dry heat has no margin: the pieces against the metal go from fragrant to acrid inside a minute, and the bitterness cannot be picked back out of a ground mixture.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Crisp lager or pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
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