What Is Curry Powder in Japan?
Curry powder is generally made from turmeric, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, pepper, red pepper, and dried citrus peel.
Curry powder is much more convenient than curry roux because it can be used in a wide variety of dishes.
For instance, you can use curry powder as the main seasoning when making stir-fried food and fried rice. Additionally, you can make extremely delicious grilled chicken using the marinated sauce with curry powder. Salad dressing with the curry powder is also amazing!
Good Substitutes for Curry Powder
But, what if you can’t find any of curry powder at stores near you?
Don’t worry. There are several great materials that you can use as a substitute for it.
Please use this as a reference!
1. Curry Roux
As you can see above, curry roux is made from flour, oil, sugar, salt, and various spices.
Most importantly, it already contains various types of seasonings including sugar, salt, etc. Therefore, you wouldn’t need to add any other seasonings, if you use the roux to some extent.
Because it is a solid substance, you can cut or grate it according to the volume of the usage.
If you sprinkle the curry roux on the finished dish while grated with a grater, it’s going to add great flavor to the dish.
2. Garam Masala
As I mentioned, curry powder is made from various type of spices. Similarly, garam masala is just like that. It depends on the manufacturers, but garam masala is generally made from black pepper, chili pepper, cardamom, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, etc.
It would be really nice to add garam masala when making meat dishes or stir-fried dishes. Moreover, using garam masala as a secret ingredient is also great even though it’s not the main taste of the dish.
Unlike the curry roux, garam masala doesn’t contain much sweetness and saltiness ingredient. That is why, please feel free to adjust the taste using other seasonings.
3. Turmeric
It is a powder of dried turmeric root. Actually, this is one of the main ingredient of the curry powder in Japan.
Turmeric doesn’t have much taste and flavor, however it gives a beautiful color like curry to the dish.
In order to create the taste of curry powder, please add some other spices, for example, chili pepper, coriander, cumin, and allspice.
4. Coriander
This is also the ingredient of curry powder. You can feel refreshing and spicy scent and subtle sweetness from coriander.
It has relatively strong scent, so please add little by little and adjust the amount to your liking.
You should probably use coriander together with chili pepper and cumin to reproduce the taste of more authentic curry powder.
5. Cumin
Although the scent of cumin is weaker than the one of garam masala, it definitely has the scent similar to curry powder.
As I said, (3) turmeric and (4) coriander are tend to need other spices to reproduce the flavor of curry powder. On the other hand, even if you use only this one kind of spice, cumin, it will work well.
