buy these 8 spices to get started with indian cooking

and no, curry powder is not one of them

Probably nobody needs this disclaimer by now but yeah, this is my newsletter, I’m opinionated. Sue me. The choices in this post reflect the food I ate growing up Punjabi in Delhi and Rajasthan. I’ll probably write an analogous follow-up for South Indian food at some point. Anyway so the prize goes to:

if you only get 1 spice

crying because of all the onion chopping not because life is a brief candle followed by endless oblivion

Get cumin seeds. They’re versatile and flavorful. You can make tadka for dal. You can make subzis and chicken. You can toast em and grind em to get cumin powder. You can put that powder in yogurt to make raita. But most importantly, cumin seeds will allow you to practice the essential, indispensable technique of Indian cooking: tempering whole spices in fat.

Tempering is so key that I’ll write about it over and over again in this newsletter, but the gist of it is that you heat some fat and then add spices to it. This starts a very short timer before the spices burn. You must prevent that by cooling the hot fat by mixing it with a larger quantity of other material, like onions or dal or water. Your job is to know each spice well enough to judge when it is optimally tempered but not yet burned.

Cumin seeds are a great first or second whole spice (the other being mustard seeds) because they so clearly communicate their distress at being heated. They reach us using three of our five senses: they swell and bubble (sight); they sizzle (sound); and they give off a warm toasty cumin-y fragrance (smell).

scary spice

“why won’t he just give me amazon affiliate links for all these magic powders???!!!”

You need some kind of red chili powder but the reason isn’t what you think it is. It’s not to make the food spicy, as in producing a burning sensation in the mouth. What we’re actually after are the flavors and colors produced by heating red chili powder in oil at moderate to high temperatures. You may be familiar with these flavors and colors from Hungarian smoked paprika, Chinese chili oils like Lao Gan Ma, or Mexican fried dried peppers. What’s going on is similar to when you sear a steak or roast vegetables: browning reactions create complex flavors which then dissolve into the oil. Boom now we have a delicious umami bomb oil to do with as we please.

Many of my friends don’t want their food to be spicy, so I recommend getting a mild Hungarian or Spanish paprika instead of Indian red chili powder. HERESY! But whatever, this entire newsletter is heresy and I know y’all are here for it. The next best thing is Kashmiri chili powder. Another option is Degi mirch, which is often just Kashmiri chili powder but sometimes a blend of multiple dried and powdered mild red peppers.

When I want to make food spicy I use other tools at my disposal. Hot Indian red chili powder is just one of them. Others include fresh green hot peppers, Habanero peppers, or Thai bird’s eye chilis. The principle here is separation of concerns: making the food spicy is something I only sometimes want, for certain guests, whereas I very often want the smoky roasty hit of browned red chili pepper.

Let’s not forget the importance of looks:

doggy in the corner excited about indian food. little does she know that (A) she’s getting dry kibble for dinner that night and (B) she will be dead by 2024. RIP shanti!

Red chili oil just looks so fucking cool. And it’s an honest signal: it looking good is sign that it’s going to taste good.

speaking of looks

What even is the point of turmeric?

“watcha thinkin about?” literally turmeric, far too often, sigh

I have a love-hate relationship with turmeric. It’s tricky to handle because it’s such a powerful yellow dye and will ruin your clothes and stain your fingernails. It’s so subtle that I’m hard-pressed to describe exactly what’s missing when it’s missing. In my clearest moments I must admit it’s mostly there to make the food look good. And yet it’s in my top 3 spices. Are looks really that important?

And then there’s the overblown health claims. Don’t even get me started on the poor quality of the randomized controlled trials, or how people bring up its potential as an antiseptic for external wounds when we’re discussing ingestion. You wouldn’t make a latte out of neosporin and charge hipsters $8 a pop, now, would you? Yikes please don’t sue me if you actually do that.

I’ve done double-blind (literally and figuratively, since its presence is so visually obvious) taste tests with friends and come to conclude that while I can detect when it’s not in the food, most of my friends can’t. And yet, take the blindfold off and the difference is stark. You gotta have that yellow or the food just looks too mellow.

Turmeric has a strong taste when raw and you don’t really want this taste in your food. It needs to be cooked, and it needs to be used in small quantities. Use about 3/4 teaspoon for a pot of dal or a cast iron pan full of veggies. Err on the side of too little rather than too much. Take a sniff when you first add it so you learn to recognize that raw turmeric smell, and then smell it again after 5 or so minutes of heating to internalize how it gets less aggressive when cooked.

the rest of them

I made you read all this stuff before giving you a list because I want to make a point: each of these spices is its own special thing. Each is a particular part of some unique plant, with its peculiar use and behavior. Each has its own smell and flavor. Each has a raw scent and a different aroma when heated. It’s worth getting to know each one on its own. In future posts we’ll blur the distinctions between them and abstract away their identities: we will speak of whole spices, powdered spices, meaty spices and light spices. We will discuss substitutions and combinations. But it’s worth remembering that those abstractions are leaky. The underlying physical reality is always lurking, ready to reassert itself: each spice is an individual material.

I discussed the top 3 in detail above. I have more to say about them and also about the rest but this post is getting long. Here you go:

1. Cumin seeds

2. Some form of red chili powder, probably mild Hungarian paprika

3. Turmeric powder

4. Coriander powder

5. Mustard seeds

6. Hing

7. Green cardamom pods

8. Whole cloves

Don’t buy more stuff in the beginning because you’ll be less likely to really get to know each ingredient. It’s a waste of money and shelf space. After months or years of disuse, all those little jars of stale spices will follow you as you move from one apartment to another, silent yet plaintive reminders of your shopping mistakes. How would I ever know this, I’ve never made this mistake haha I just have an incredibly vivid imagination right? Right.

So I’m not including a list of nice-to-have spices, because that will just cause some people to make mistakes. Plus I can probably write another post about that later and get more of that sweet internet dopamine.

The title is clickbait, again. Speaking of clickbait, will I ever tell the story of how I quit my tech job and started teaching cooking?