We have turmeric in the cupboard, but I rarely use it. Sometimes I’ll bake chicken tenderloins with kosher salt and turmeric. Served with broccoli, it’s a quick and easy meal. I’ve just found this recipe:
That looks good. It’s like the chicken, but it adds oil (I’d use olive oil instead of avocado oil), garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, and black pepper to the salt and turmeric. It might make a nice change from Trader Joe’s Salmon Pinwheels, Costco Salmon Milano with Basil Pesto Butter, or Salmon with fresh rosemary sprigs and lemon slices.
I think turmeric goes particularly well with cabbage and other cruciferous veg. A stir-fry of cabbage, potatoes and onions, well-seasoned with turmeric, is really good. Likewise, it goes well in a vegetable soup if the soup contains a lot of cabbage or broccoli or rutabaga.
I’ll have to try it on the broccoli. I usually only have cabbage when I make corned beef and cabbage (either with a slow-cooked brisket, or a quick meal using a tin of corned beef). How would the turmeric taste with that?
Oh, the other time I use cabbage is when I make fish tacos. In that case, I make a fish taco sauce.
Yep, most curry powder will have turmeric as an ingredient. I cook with turmeric all the time, because I make curries a lot as well.
Another good thing to make with turmeric is Thai chicken satay. It was one of the few things our kids would eat at a Thai restaurant when they were younger, so my wife and I started making it at home. The turmeric coconut milk marinade is so good that, instead of getting rid of it after the chicken was done marinating, I’d boil it well for 5 or 10 minutes and drizzle it over rice.
The key to falling in love with turmeric is to toast it before you add it to your recipe. Just put a bit of oil in a frying pan and then add a couple of tablespoons of turmeric. Fry on medium-high heat until it gets toasty and smells nutty. Now add to almost anything for an amazing flavor bomb. Goes especially well with lemon or tomato.
A long time ago I stumbled on a fantastic scrambled egg seasoning: mix equal parts ground turmeric, freshly ground nutmeg, and powdered galangal (aka “Laos powder”). Use one generous pinch of this spice mix for each egg you are scrambling, plus salt to taste. Only make the mix in small quantities, as you want to use it up before the nutmeg loses its oomph.
I use fresh turmeric (we grow it in our yard) for a Malaysian rendang (spicy beef stew) recipe. The fresh stuff is a revelation! Despite living in Indonesia for many years, where it was easy to buy the root fresh in the grocery, I never tried it until recently. I’m not the smoothie-making sort myself, but if I were, I would definitely use plenty of fresh turmeric. It’s pleasingly aromatic in a way the dried stuff can’t match.
Well, I almost said ‘all’, but I’ve learned to avoid absolutes here. I’d be afraid if I said ‘all curry powder’ someone would chime in with something like “not true! Curries from the Kerala region of India contain no turmeric”
(Just as an example- I have no idea about the specific nature of curry from Kerala)
I understand @solost’s caution though. I am partial to Cambodian curry powder, which (like most curry flavors I’ve encountered throughout SE Asia) has a different flavor profile, featuring a star anise/fennel taste rather than the cumin-cardamom emphasis I associate with Indian curries.
The Cambodian stuff I use is brownish, not yellow. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t contain turmeric (but at least one version does).
I’ve been using fresh turmeric for rice for the past few months after I bought a fistful on a whim. They’re each about half a finger in size and I microplane one into a cup of dry rice before steaming. The color change is amazing, it looks for all the world like carrot until it’s cooked when it’s just as yellow as can be. Flavor? I’m not sure but it’s certainly mild.
I’ve just been keeping the little turmerics on the counter and they’re showing their age a bit, a little dried out.
If anybody remembers Screaming Yellow Zonkers (a brand of candied popcorn), the day-glo screaming yellow color was turmeric.
Fun with pH indicators: Alkali turns it red, the shade of dried blood. Experiment with soaking a paper towel in wet turmeric and let it dry. Titrate drops of baking soda solution onto the center of it and make an expanding red area. Now titrate drops of vinegar into the center of the red spot. It’ll fizz. What’ll happen to the color?
In Cambodia from the local shops (it helps to have connections that travel there) so I don’t know if the brand that we both linked to tastes as good. But I see it includes fennel and star anise, so that’s promising. It’s redder than the stuff I’ve had, though.
Yeah, I’ve burned my toast here as well.