Garam Masala

I have to admit, I’ve been saving this one for when I really had no time or motivation to make a full on recipe. This is mostly because I can’t tell you what it turned out like, as you don’t eat garam masala by itself. You use it in a curry.

So spoiler: there’s no rating and the rest of this blog is utterly pointless.

Day Six: Garam Masala

Reader, it was 1 o’ clock in the morning and I hadn’t yet figured out what I was going to cook. I’d just returned from a dinner out with my old flatmates and I wasn’t hungry at all, but I’d made a commitment dammit!

So, like the princess I am, I asked my dad to collect me from the station and then drop me to the 24 hour petrol station M&S so I could buy some onions. I figured whatever I was going to cook needed onions.

Flicking through Tastefully Yours when I got in did not prove as fruitful (or as vegetab-ul) as one would hope, and the onions were in fact not going to factor into my master plan.

The easiest thing to make at 1 in the morning was in fact Garam Masala. Not the quietest thing to make (sorry to my neighbours) as it required an electric blender, but certainly the easiest.

Just a bunch of powdered ingredients blended and sieved into a jar.

There’s really nothing else to say.

I guess I can tell you a bit about the background of Garam Masala — I mean, you’re here now, I can’t leave you with no takeaways whatsoever.

If you only have one powder / spice in your cupboard, Garam Masala is the one to have. It’s really the only one you need to make a Goan curry: Garam Masala, vinegar, onions, garlic and ginger.

A quick pit-stop at Wikipedia tells me that Garam masala (from garam (“hot”) and masala (a mixture of spices)) is a blend of ground spices originating from South Asia. It is common in Indian, Pakistani, Nepalese, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan and Caribbean cuisines.

Goan Garam Masala probably has little distinguishable difference from the other masalas, but Goan grandmothers certainly have different Garam Masala recipes to each other.

This is why when the ingredients were all blended, it didn’t smell quite like… home.

So this week I’ve made it my mission to visit my grandmother and make another batch of Garam Masala with her.

For this 1am batch I used: cinnamon powder, cumin, cardamom, cloves, black pepper, and coriander powder. I’ll update you with my grandmother’s ingredients in due course.

But for smell alone, I give this masala a 6/10

P.s. Shoutout to my aunt who stayed up on FaceTime making this with me! Yes she told me off constantly for making my recipe too late today, for being untidy in the kitchen, for setting off the blender too late, for being unprepared, for not using the right blender… but she was also very helpful in giving me the idea to sieve the powder when the chunks of cardamom wouldn’t blend.

Pro-tip: just use the inside of the cardamom pods rather than put the husks in the blender too.