Spicy Curry Leaf Crisp
A bold condiment for flavor hounds
My uncle introduced us to chili crisp about 10 years ago and when I tasted it I felt my brain light up, neurons firing. It was a little spicy, but its intense crimson color belied a condiment more intensely savory than spicy. And then came the slight numbing sensation. The Sichuan pepper in chili crisp reads as simultaneously hot and cool on the tongue, the electric feeling of a plant throwing its best defense mechanisms at you and failing as you reach for more.
As a recipe developer, when I taste something that gets my attention in this way my first question is, “how is this delicious thing made?” I don’t always try to recreate the delicious thing, but having an idea of the process usually teaches me something or provides brainstorming fuel. Chili crisp, or Lao Gan Ma, is widely available, so even after I learned more about how it was made it didn’t occur to me to go to the trouble of making it myself until it became so popular that we couldn’t easily buy it anymore.
This was circa 2017 or 2018, and we were hunkered down working on the 2019 edition of Joy, subsisting on innumerable iterations of rice and beans. This may surprise you, but you can’t live on recipe test leftovers when you’re 20 recipes deep in the cake chapter with nary a vegetable in sight. Considering the circumstances, condiments were very important to our way of life.
Our insatiable appetite for rice and bean flavorings and the lack of access to Lao Gan Ma forced us to reverse engineer it. In fact, we wound up including it in the 2019 edition (page 572). In the intervening years, as Lao Gan Ma became more available we went the DIY route less and less often, but then we learned about another oil-based condiment ripe for making at home: salsa macha.
I am sorry to say that I didn’t know about salsa macha until two years ago, and now I’m trying to make up for it. I’ve bought a few jars by different brands, but salsa macha tends to be expensive. More so than Lao Gan Ma, anyway. As a consequence, I learned how to make it myself following Pati Jinich’s recipe. Now I stock a pint jar of the stuff in our fridge at all times.
As different as Lao Gan Ma and salsa macha are, they share a key principle: fat as flavor carrier.
Aromatics fried in oil become toasted, their flavors deepen, and the oil they are fried in takes on that flavor as well. Fat is a superb flavor carrier, as most flavor compounds are fat soluble. When we cook, we harness fat’s flavor-carrying abilities all the time: Sauteing onions and garlic in oil, flavoring stir fry oil with a chile and a smashed garlic, and tempering spices in oil as in tadka. If you’re not familiar with tadka, this piece by Nik Sharma is an excellent place to start. In short, tadka is a technique wherein whole spices, chiles, and aromatics like curry leaves are fried in oil. This oil can serve as the flavor base for a dish or it can be spooned on top of a finished dish much like a condiment or garnish. Unlike Lao Gan Ma and salsa macha, tadka is made in small batches either before or after the dish it accompanies or flavors. In other words, it’s not something you keep in a jar.
But, I thought, how lovely would it be to have the flavors of a tadka in a format similar to chili crisp? The result is this recipe. It is by no means a replacement for tadka in Indian recipes, but it is outstanding on rice, over eggs, with dumplings, or even drizzled over hummus.
If you watch my TikTok video you’ll notice that it differs slightly from the recipe below. In the video I mistakenly add the chiles first instead of the cashews. That worked out fine, but in the recipe I have you adding the cashews first so they have time to get toastier. Curry leaves can be downright explosive when a bunch of them are added to hot oil (ask me how I know…), so my trick here is to let the oil cool slightly before adding them and slap a lid on the pan right away.
Let me know what you think in the comments!
Spicy Curry Leaf Crisp
Makes about 2 cups
The easiest way to seed the chiles is to break them in half with gloved hands and shake the seeds out, pinching the sides of the chiles to open them up and allow the seeds to fall out.
Add to a skillet or saucepan heat over medium heat:
1½ cups preferred vegetable oil (such as avocado or canola)
Heat until the oil is hot, 3 to 5 minutes. When you stick a chopstick or skewer into the oil and touch the bottom of the pan, small bubbles should rise up. Add:
½ cup (70g) raw cashews
4 garlic cloves, chopped
Turn the heat down to medium-low and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes or until the cashews and garlic start to brown. Add:
1 ounce (28g) Kashmiri chiles, seeded
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
1 tablespoon yellow or brown mustard seeds
Cook until the chiles turn a muted red and the spices are fragrant, about 1 minute. Turn off the heat (move the skillet to a cool burner if using an electric stove) and let the oil cool for 2 minutes. Add, immediately covering the pan with a lid (curry leaves spatter and pop dramatically when added to hot oil):
20 curry leaves
Use the handle of the pan to gently shake the pan back and forth to help the curry leaves settle into the oil and cook. Leave the mixture to cool for 15 minutes.
Transfer the oil and spices to a food processor and add:
2 tablespoons white vinegar
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 teaspoon fine sea salt or table salt (or 2 teaspoons Diamond kosher)
Pulse until the cashews and spices are well ground but still have a bit of texture (12 to 14 pulses). Transfer to a jar with a tight-fitting lid and store refrigerated for up to 1 month.