Do you use turmeric? If so, how do you use it? What does it add to a recipe?
And do you believe it has medicinal uses?
No, I don’t use it, because I have a ready-mixed curry powder I like. My husband uses it because he likes to pick and choose his own spices when he makes curry.
I hadn’t heard much about medicinal uses for turmeric. There was some other yellow powdered spice I had an Indian recipe before that was used medicinally–when my grandmother (born 1913) was a little girl and had a cold, her mother would put a bag of it around her neck. What waaaas that stuff… I can’t remember the name.
My grocery has recently begun to carry fresh turmeric root. I have no idea what anyone does with it.
I use it the usual way, in South Asian food. One typical use would be an Indian scrambled eggs dish, which I start with frying onions, ginger, tomato, and chile peppers in oil, adding some cumin and turmeric, then my beaten eggs mixture. It has a distinct “earthy” flavor for lack of better description, and gives the dish a beautiful golden color. And, of course, I use it for various masalas/curry powder mixtures. It’s also commonly used to add color to things like rice or as a substitute for the very expensive saffron (it’s not at all a good substitute, IMHO. It adds color, but the flavor is way different). It works nice for color in homemade mustard, though.
As for fresh turmeric, I’ve seen it in Malaysian, Indonesian, and Thai recipes.
Yep I use it in curries and in pickles like this awesome recipe for Zuni Café Zucchini Pickles.
I use it many, many Indian dishes. It’s also used in pickling.*
*As Zoid already pointed out.
I bet it was asafoetida. And I use turmeric, mainly for pickles.
I’d use it more often if it didn’t take steel wool + a blowtorch to remove turmeric stains, which seem to get on everything.
I make a wicked Fluorescent Potatoes with turmeric, sliced onions and potatoes and garlic. Mind your cooktop though, it splatters and turns everything it touches bright yellow!
I’ve also used it for dying eggs and fabric, but just for fun. It takes more of it than you’d think (based on the cooktop staining!) and it’s just not cost effective for routine use, only as a novelty.
There’s a lot of excitement about turmeric in herbals circles this year, but I think most of it is overblown hype. Herbs have trends, like hemlines and hairstyles, and this year, turmeric is “in”.
There was an interesting, small study about a form of curcumin (one of the chemicals in turmeric) and Depression that was published recently. Showed results equal to Prozac in treating mild to moderate Depression. However, the quantity of curcumin used was roughly equivalent to 42 capsules of good quality ground turmeric every day, which is a hard sell to a patient. When I pointed this out on an Herbal Healing Facebook page, and noted that I thought we might be witnessing the birth of a new drug derived from a plant, not a validation of turmeric itself for Depression, I was…not well received.
WebMDhas clinical evidence leading them to rate it as “Possibly Effective” for reducing stomach upset and reducing pain from osteoarthritis - two traditional uses for it. And then there’s a whole slew of traditional and proposed uses for it without much or any evidence to back it up.
That’s it.