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Tadka
The technique half of Indian cooking stands on
🌱 Beginner🧂 Base Recipe🌿 Vegan⚡ 6 min
Not a dish, but the move that appears in nearly every recipe here: whole spices are bloomed in hot fat and poured over the finished food. Once you can do tadka, everything else you cook improves.
🌱 Beginner: Nothing here can go wrong. If you can boil pasta, you can cook this.
Prep3 min
Cook time3 min
Total6 min
Servesfor 4 servings of dal, vegetables or yoghurt
Contains:
Mustard
Refers to the recipe as written here. Store-bought ingredients may carry traces — please check the packet.
Ingredients
0 of 7✅ All set to cook!
Method
0 of 5🎉 All done — enjoy!
- Heat a small pan with the fat until properly hot. Too cool is the most common mistake: the spices just steep through instead of blooming, and taste raw.
- Add the mustard seeds. As soon as they pop like popcorn, add the cumin seeds - they need less heat and would burn otherwise.
- Add the hing, the red chili and the garlic. 20–30 seconds, until the garlic turns golden.
- Add the curry leaves last. They spatter fiercely for a moment - having the lid in your other hand is a good idea.
- Pour immediately over the finished dish and stir through just once.
Tips
- The order is not arbitrary - it ranks the ingredients by how much heat they need: mustard, then cumin, then aromatics, then leaves.
- Powdered spices like chili or ground coriander always go into the fat after it leaves the heat. In the pan they burn within seconds and turn bitter.
- A tadka poured over plain yoghurt, steamed vegetables, or leftovers turns them into a dish.
- In South India, coconut oil is used. It pairs beautifully with curry leaves and keeps the tadka vegan.
Shop the Ingredients
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