Turmeric shows up in a lot of American grocery aisles now — powdered in the spice rack, fresh in the produce cooler next to the ginger, blended into drinks. In much of the world it never had to arrive anywhere. It's been a weekday ingredient for a very long time, used the way you'd use onions or bay leaves: bought in quantity, reached for without ceremony, not thought about much.
It helps to know what it is. Turmeric is a rhizome — a knobby underground stem, in the same botanical family as ginger. Fresh, it looks like small ginger with startling orange flesh. Dried and ground, it's the familiar yellow powder, and that's the form that travels.
India, mostly
India grows most of the world's turmeric, and much of the crop is used at home rather than exported. Haldi goes into dal, into vegetable dishes, into marinades for fish and chicken, into the water that potatoes boil in. The amounts are usually small — a quarter teaspoon dropped into hot oil at the start of a dish, or a pinch stirred into a pot that already has plenty else going on.
There's regional variation on top of the everyday use. In parts of the north, fresh turmeric gets pickled in winter, sliced up with ginger and lemon and mustard oil. Along the Konkan coast the leaves get used as well as the rhizome: patoleo are sweet rice cakes packed with coconut and jaggery, wrapped in turmeric leaves and steamed, so the leaf perfumes the whole thing.
Farther east
Across much of Southeast Asia, fresh turmeric is more common than dried, and the leaf is an ingredient in its own right. Sliced very thin, it goes into Malaysian and Indonesian curries — rendang among them — where it adds an aroma the powder doesn't really give you.
Indonesian nasi kuning is rice cooked with coconut milk and turmeric until it's deep yellow, and it turns up at celebrations, sometimes built into the ceremonial cone called tumpeng. Southern Thai curries lean on fresh turmeric pounded into the paste. In Vietnam, the batter for bánh xèo gets its color from turmeric before it hits the pan, which is why those crepes come out looking like they do.
Persian, Moroccan, Ethiopian
In Persian cooking, turmeric usually goes in at the very beginning — into the oil with the onions, before anything else joins them. That's the base of a lot of stews, and it's doing quiet background work rather than announcing itself.
Moroccan cooking uses it in tagines and in spice blends, often alongside ginger, cumin and cinnamon. In a dish like chicken with preserved lemon and olives, saffron sets the color of the sauce, and turmeric is often there to stretch the saffron or stand in for it.
Ethiopian cooking splits its stews roughly into the ones built on berbere, which are red and hot, and the alicha ones, which are mild and yellow. Kik alicha — yellow split peas cooked down soft — sits firmly in the second group.
The Caribbean
Curry in Trinidad and Guyana is generally traced to Indian indentured laborers who arrived in the nineteenth century, and it went its own way from there. The curry powders sold there tend to be heavy on turmeric and cumin, and they get used on things that would be unfamiliar back in India — curried mango, curried duck, curried channa folded into doubles from a street cart.
What it's actually doing in the pot
Color, first. Few kitchen ingredients produce that particular yellow-orange, and color is one of the oldest reasons cooks have reached for it.
Flavor-wise, turmeric is earthy and a bit bitter, with a woody, faintly musky edge. Fresh turmeric is brighter and more peppery than the powder, which is mellower and dustier. It is rarely the loudest thing in a dish. It sits underneath garlic and ginger and chilies and cumin and gives them somewhere to stand.
A few things about cooking with it that come up again and again:
It usually goes in early, into hot fat, rather than getting stirred in at the end. Raw powder added late tends to taste chalky.
It gets on with acid. Lemon, lime, tamarind, tomato and vinegar all sharpen it up, and most of the dishes above have something sour in them.
It stains easily. Cutting boards, fingernails, plastic containers, grout, the occasional shirt. Fresh turmeric can be worse than the powder because of the juice.
If you want to cook with it more
Start with less than seems right. A half teaspoon into a pot of lentils or a pan of rice is plenty, and it's easy to tip over into bitter. Bloom it in oil with your onions or garlic instead of adding it to liquid. Then make sure there's salt, fat and something acidic in the finished dish, because turmeric on its own can taste a little flat and those three take care of it.
It's an easy ingredient to build a habit around once you've got it in the house. Roasted cauliflower, a pot of beans, chicken thighs, scrambled eggs, rice — it suits all of them, and none of that requires a special trip.
Turmeric in a bottle
Turmeric turns up in drinks as well as in cooking. Ours is one of them.
Turmeric Time is a ready-to-drink wellness shot made with organic turmeric extract, organic ginger juice and organic ginger extract, black pepper extract, citrus, and honey. It's got a kick from the ginger and black pepper extract with a citrus flavor running through it, and the honey softens the edges. No preservatives, no artificial flavors or colors, no artificial sweeteners. It's non-GMO and bottled in the USA.
It comes in packs of 6, 12, 24 and 48. There's no refrigeration required, so it can live in a work bag, a desk drawer or a kitchen cabinet, and you can drink it chilled or at room temperature. Current pricing is on the product page.
If you're curious about the flavor side of turmeric before you cook with it much, what turmeric actually tastes like is a decent place to go next.