Curry Leaf Podi
The Quirky Foodster Team
Ingredients
- Fresh curry leaves (dried before grinding) — 2 cups
- Urad dal — 1/4 cup
- Chana dal — 2 tbsp
- Dried red chiles — 4-6
- a marble-sized piece of tamarind
- Salt — to taste
- tempered with mustard seed and asafoetida
Method
- Dry-roast the curry leaves until crisp and the dals until golden, cool, then grind everything together with the tamarind and salt into a coarse-to-fine powder.
- Essential — both the curry leaves and the lentils must be thoroughly dried/roasted to grind properly and to develop the podi's characteristic toasted depth.
Origin: South India, particularly Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh — part of the broader ‘podi’ (dry spice powder) tradition.
Use: Traditionally mixed with a generous amount of sesame or ghee and eaten as a condiment stirred into rice, rather than added during cooking of another dish.
Classic Dishes: Curry leaf rice (a simple, iconic South Indian preparation where this podi is the entire flavoring).
Storage: Keeps 2-3 weeks at room temperature, or 2-3 months refrigerated — shorter-lived than most spice blends in this reference given the fresh curry leaf content.
Variations: Part of a broader South Indian ‘podi’ family of dry lentil-and-spice condiment powders, of which gunpowder/milagai podi is another well-known member.
Substitutions: No close substitute given the essential role of fresh curry leaves; dried curry leaves produce a noticeably inferior result.
- Fresh curry leaves (dried before grinding) — 2 cups
- Urad dal — 1/4 cup
- Chana dal — 2 tbsp
- Dried red chiles — 4-6
- a marble-sized piece of tamarind
- Salt — to taste
- tempered with mustard seed and asafoetida
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