What is a Tadka? Unleash the Hidden Power of Dried Spices

When I first started cooking, I’d add spices to my dishes randomly and just hope for the best.

Nine times out of ten, the dish didn’t take on any of the spice’s flavour. I’ve since learned that the reason this happened is because the flavour of dried spices is essentially locked.

If you want your dish to taste of a given spice, you essentially need to “unlock” its flavour. Think about Han Solo from Star Wars, frozen in carbonite. He’s alive, but he’s basically useless until he’s unfrozen.

So, how do actually unfreeze spices?

While this process significantly extends the spice’s shelf life, it also locks in its flavour, diminishing its potency.

For example, if you garnish your dish with some fresh basil, it’ll provide a prominent taste and smell. But if you sprinkle over some dried basil, you’ll probably hardly even notice it.

But like I said, there are ways to unlock the flavour of the dried spice: one such approach is the tadka.

That raises the obvious question, what is a tadka?

What is a tadka?

While the name might sound like some sort of deep lore Star Wars creature, in actuality, a tadka an Indian tempering or blooming technique where spices are heated up briefly in some kind of fat to release their flavours.

Confusingly, tadka is a term that is both a verb describing the process of actually creating a tadka and a noun describing the end product.

Whatever you want to call it, the technique isn’t the only way to unlock flavour from dried spices, but it is one of the easiest and most delicious. Plus, it’s an essential technique for any Indian cooking. That being said, it’s not just limited to Indian cuisine. You can use the tadka for any dish that uses dried herbs or spices.

Once the tadka has been prepared and the flavour of the spices has been released, you can use it in two ways.

You can either use it as a garnish on top of a finished dish to add more depth of flavour, or you can use it as a base for a dish like a curry or stew.

Before we start cooking, let’s explore the science behind the tadka. There are three factors you’re going to need to think about when you’re making a tadka: heat, fat, and the spices that you’re actually going to use.

It’s helpful to understand the science behind the heat and fat factors.

Let’s look at heat first. The only way to unlock that frozen flavour is through heat, plus through caramelisation and the Maillard reaction.

Heating up the spices creates really powerful flavours. The Maillard reaction is basically a series of chemical reactions that happen when food reaches a certain temperature, and it’s why browned food tastes so good.

That’s essentially our objective. As we heat up the spices, we want to get a nice browning.

We need to be careful, though. Spices, particularly ground spices, can burn very easily. We want them browned, but we don’t want them burnt.

This is the challenge of the tadka. It’s crucial to rely on your senses, observing and sniffing the spices diligently during the cooking process. You need to watch and smell the spices carefully as they cook, and if they start to burn, you need to take them off the heat immediately.

Fat, the second factor that we need to consider, is essentially the vehicle for releasing the flavour from the spices. Without fat, the Maillard reaction that we talked about just can’t happen. We won’t be able to get the browning that we want. And if we can’t get the browning that we want, we can’t get the flavour that we want.

You can use any source of fat in your tadka, just make sure it’s fresh. Most people don’t realise that oil has a shelf life. Most oils only last about a year before they start to go off, and even then, it depends on how it’s stored. If your oil is rancid, your tadka is going to taste the same. So, you want to make sure to check your oil’s expiry date and give it a smell for good measure too. Aside from oils, you can also use dairy fats like ghee or regular butter in your tadka.

So, that’s enough science. Let’s actually make a tadka. There are four major steps to making a tadka:

• Choose your tools
• Choose your fat
• Choose your spices, herbs and aromatics
• Cook the tadka

The whole process can be finished in a matter of minutes.

First, let’s choose our tools.

Before you do anything, you want to make sure you’ve got the right equipment at hand. You don’t really need much.

Ideally, you should use a small saucepan with deep sides and a lid. This is especially applicable if you want to add anything fresh to the tadka. Fresh ginger, garlic, and onion all have moisture. When that moisture mixes with the oil at high heat, it begins to splutter. That’ll not only make a mess, but it could burn you. It’s better to be safe than sorry. You can just use any pan you like, though, if you’re preparing the tadka as a base for your dish, it makes sense to just use whatever pan you’re going to cook that dish in.

Next, you want to choose your source of fat.

While traditional Indian options include vegetable oil, coconut oil, mustard oil, or ghee, any fat can be used.

Those choices will work really well in an Indian dish, but if you’re preparing some sort of non-Indian dish, you might want to opt for a different fat source more closely aligned with the cuisine that you’re preparing for. For example, extra virgin olive oil or butter may be more appropriate for an Italian dish.

Next, we want to choose your spices, herbs, and aromatics.

A number of ingredients can be added to a tadka.

Serious Eats have a great article that goes through all the options in detail, but essentially, you’ll want to add spices, herbs, and aromatics that have either a rich flavour or add texture.

Most whole spices, dried ground spices, dried herbs, seeds, and even some small beans and lentils will work pretty well. Some examples of whole spices could be whole chillies, cinnamon sticks, or cardamom pods. There are any number of seeds that you could use as well—caraway, cumin, mustard, nigella, fenugreek, sesame, or coriander will all work pretty well.

The options for ground spices and dried herbs are equally plentiful—ground cinnamon, turmeric, ground coriander, asafoetida, chilli powder, basil, oregano—the list is endless.

In terms of beans, I’d be a bit more selective. They’ll add a nice crunchy texture, so if that’s something that you’re looking for, you may want to consider adding split pigeon peas or urad dal.

You can also add some fresh ingredients like diced onion, chopped chillies, minced garlic, or minced ginger.

My Indian housemate told me that for an Indian tadka, asafoetida is essential, whereas in that Serious Eats article that I talked about, they make a tadka with just mustard seeds, caraway seeds, and chilli powder. I guess everyone has their own rules, which suggests that there’s no right way to make a tadka.

Whatever you choose, make sure you’ve got your spices, herbs, and aromatics measured out and ready to go before you start the tadka. Cooking is fast, and the last thing you want to be doing while your tadka is cooking is rushing around to find your spices or prepare some fresh ingredients.

That leads us into the actual process. This will literally only take about a minute. You need to use your senses. Keep smelling to make sure it’s not burning and watch the spices carefully. I can’t emphasise this enough. You don’t want to add a burnt tadka to your dish because you’ll ruin all your hard work.

Tadka recipe

• Grab your pan of choice and heat it over medium-low.
• Once the pan’s heated up, add enough oil to coat the pan. (If you’re conscious of how much oil you’re using, just use a smaller pan. The smaller pan means you’ll need less oil to fully coat it).
• Wait for the oil to heat up. To test if it’s hot enough, toss in a few seeds. If the seeds sizzle instantly, that means the oil is ready, and you’re ready to start.
• If you’re using seeds, toss in the rest now alongside all your whole spices, small beans, or lentils if you’re using them. (Don’t add whole chillies yet, though. They’ll burn really easily, so we’ll add them a little bit later). If you’re using onion and ginger and you want it to brown, add it at this point too.
• After a few seconds, you should be able to start to smell the spices. Once you can, add all of the ground spices except for chilli powder. As with whole chillies, chilli powder burns very easily, so we’ll add that later too.
• Once the ground spices are in, you can finally add your whole dried chillies. Next, we’ll add any fresh chilli, and if we don’t want our onion and ginger to be browned, we can add that now. We’ll throw in the garlic as well if you’re using that.
• After a short while, the spices should be aromatic. Once you can smell them, take the pan off the heat. You can now add your ground chilli powder too, once it’s off the heat, if you’re using it.

And that’s it! The tadka is ready. You can now use this tadka as a base for a dish or as a garnish for stews, soups, or curries.

Either way, I promise that the tadka will provide some of the nicest spices you’ve ever tasted.