The Flavors of India

I have here a sample photo of the spices that I mention a lot whenever I share recipes and post it here on my blog. I just wanted you to get familiar with some of the spices although this is not yet done since there are more than a hundred spices that I can add and I only showcased about less than ten.

Spices of Indian cooking



Anyway these are the top ingredients that you won’t miss whenever you cook an Indian dish or cuisine. I was supposed to label one ingredient to be Garam masala instead of just placing it Masala powder. Garam means hot in Hindi and most of the time we used whole garam masala which consist of cinnamon bark or stick, cloves, whole black pepper, bay leaf and cardamom seeds.
Turmeric is luyang dilaw in tagalog although you don’t use it as a whole but in a dried and powdered form. Ginger-garlic paste is derived obviously from fresh ginger and garlic which is just mixed and turned into paste.

About cloves, it has a very nice smell and strong taste of course. If you have toothache, you can use cloves as a home remedy for your aching tooth. It is also an ingredient here for tooth paste and it is good to fight off bacteria.

Red chili powder is derived from dried red chilies which are powderized. Another ingredient that I have mentioned here was jeera seeds or cumin. I have never seen this one in my country and never did we use it in any dish. The very first time I have seen this ingredient is when I arrived here in India and hubby used it a lot in his cooking.

Coriander powder comes from nothing more than coriander seeds itself but was just dried and powdered. I think I don’t need to further discuss cinnamon stick and black pepper since it is always available in the market unlike the rest of the spices that I have mentioned. Next time I will be posting the other spices used in India for making their dish so special.