Jamaican Curry Powder
This Caribbean-style curry spice mix recipe is adapted from CookLikeAJamaican.com and AllRecipes.com. I've made it, and used it for curry goat and it's super delicious!
Ingredients
- 1/4 cup whole coriander seeds
- 2 tbsp whole cumin seeds
- 2 tbsp whole mustard seeds
- 2 tbsp whole anise seeds
- 1 tbsp whole fenugreek seeds
- 1 tbsp whole allspice
- 5 tbsp ground turmeric
Instructions
- Grind all the spices together in a spice grinder, or mortar and pestle(molcajete), untill your spice mix is a fine powder. Then place in an air-tight storage container.
Notes
I've opted not to pre-toast the spices, because I like keeping my spices in raw form to extend its shelve life and potency. The curry profile is Caribbean in style, so there's no hot chilli powder in there. For heat, you would want to add scotch bonnet or habanero to your dish separately.
If you prefer not to grind the spices yourself, you can technically use spices that are already ground and just mix that up. It's a lot faster. However, the difference in volume between the spices, from how loosely or tightly packed they are, to the age of the ground spices will affect the flavor somewhat.
I always prefer dry ingredient recipes by weight instead of by volume. Nonetheless, curry mixes were never in practice mixed in absolute measurements. If you go to Indian sundry shops and tell them you want a curry mix for seafood, or chicken, or mutton, they'll just scoop several types of spices into a bag without measuring exactly anyway. As long as the flavor profile is correct, your curry should taste fine.
Also, I hand-ground this curry mix using a mortar and pestle. It's a bit of a pain, but if you have the time, I find that stone pounding or stone-grinding releases the spices' essential oils better than blade grinding. If you want convenience over flavor, just use an electric spice grinder.
P.S: If you're going with the pre-ground spices, I would go a bit easier on the ground allspice and ground anise seeds though. These spices are more intense than others, and there's a lot of negative space in the whole pods. When you get it in the pre-ground form, it's actually compacted. For example, 1 tbsp of whole allspice berries is not the same as 1 tbsp of ground allspice. It's more like 1/2 tbsp.