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Curry Paste

A thick, spicy paste made from roasted spices, herbs, and aromatics, blended with vinegar and oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Turmeric and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,776 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Curry Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the paste

  1. Roast and grind coriander, jeera, pepper, and chana dal.

  2. Combine the ground mixture with turmeric, dry red chillies, mustard seed, dry ginger, garlic, salt, and sugar.

  3. Pound and grind the mixture with vinegar until it reaches a thick jelly consistency.

Fry and bottle

  1. Heat sweet oil (mustard oil is best) until bubbling hot.

  2. Fry the mixture in the hot oil until it reduces to a paste.

  3. Let it cool and then bottle it.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Turmeric + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Coriander + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Coriander + turmerictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Turmeric + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Coriander + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Coriander
Provides the main aromatic, citrusy base flavour of the paste.
Dry red chillies
Supplies heat and colour to the paste.
Mustard seed
Adds a sharp, pungent flavour that develops further when fried in oil.
Garlic
Adds pungency and savoury depth that mellows during frying.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of vinegar and chillies.
Vinegar
Adds acidity and moisture to grind the spices into a thick jelly-like paste.

The step that matters

Frying the mixture until it reduces to a paste. The paste must be fried in very hot oil long enough to cook off moisture and mellow the raw spice and vinegar flavours. Too little frying leaves it raw and wet, so it may spoil in the bottle.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (coriander, pepper, turmeric, mustard, ginger, sugar, vinegar):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against coriander, pepper, turmeric, mustard, ginger, sugar, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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