Japanese Curry Powder Recipe (カレー粉)

I've gotten some complaints over the years that my Japanese curry from scratch recipe isn't really from scratch since I don't blend my own curry powder. The thing is, I've been trying to make a Japanese style curry powder for over a decade now, spanning back to one of the first videos on this channel where I made version 2.0 of my Japanese curry rice. 11 years later, I'm now on version 4.0 of my curry recipe, but for the curry powder, I still haven't cracked the code. That is, until now. This box contains Yaban's secret formula for their curry powder, but I didn't break into their headquarters Mission Impossible style to get it. I bought it on Amazon. It contains 20 different spices, and today I'm gonna weigh out each one so that you Most of you have probably never heard of Yaban, but they're a spice brand that's a subsidiary of House Foods. Since House Foods was one of the first companies to mass-produce curry powder in Japan, they helped define the taste of Japanese curry. Because this blend has so many different spices, I'd recommend just buying the set if you live in Japan. But for the rest of you, let's see what's in here. Yaban's curry powder blend includes the usual suspects like turmeric, cumin, and coriander, but it also includes some unexpected ingredients like mandarin peel, dill, and sage. These are just a few of the ingredients I was missing in my attempts, which explains why I was never quite able to get there with my own blend. That was a lot of measuring, but here are the final quantities. There's 20 grams of turmeric, 14 grams of cumin, 12 grams of coriander, 10 grams of mandarin peel, 5 grams of fenugreek, 5 grams of fennel, 4 grams of cinnamon, 3 grams of cayenne pepper, 3 grams of garlic powder, 3 grams of ginger powder, 3 grams of dill, 2 grams of allspice, 2 grams of cardamom, 2 grams of cloves, 2 grams of star anise, 2 grams of sage, 2 grams of thyme, 2 grams of nutmeg, 2 grams of black pepper, and 2 grams of bay leaves. Okay, I've got my lineup of spices ready to go, so now we just need to blend them and toast them. To blend the curry powder, add all of the spices to a bowl. The oils in some of the spices, like cloves, have a tendency to melt plastic, so I recommend using a bowl and utensils made from something non-reactive. Okay, now we just need to mix this up. I like to use some chopsticks, but you can use a whisk or a fork. The idea is just to get these spices nice and well combined. Okay, that should do it. Let's go toast these up. I've got a frying pan heating over medium-low heat, and I'm going to add one tablespoon of a neutral oil, like canola or rice bran oil. Then I'm going to add our spices and stir this around until the oil is evenly distributed and our Japanese curry powder is super fragrant. This took about three minutes on my stove. Just be careful not to burn the spices. If they start to smoke, you'll want to get them out of the pan as soon as possible. It's going to make your curry powder taste bitter. Okay, this is smelling incredible, so I'm going to transfer the curry powder to a bowl to cool down to room temperature. Once it's cooled off, you'll want to store the curry powder in a sealed container, and I'm going to give this a few days for the flavors to mingle. Okay, it's been about a week, so let's go ahead and compare the stuff we made with some S&B, which is my benchmark for Japanese curry powder. All right, let's go ahead and crack this open. Smells like curry! So this is our S&B here. I'm going to go ahead and put a spoonful of this over here. Let's get a spoonful of our gyaban curry mix here. And right away, I can see a big difference in the color. The S&B has more of a reddish-orange tone, whereas the gyaban has more of a greenish-brownish tone. All right, let's take a sniff. Yep, the S&B smells like Japanese curry. I mean, this smells like the Rooblox. Ooh! But the gyaban, it's not exactly the same, but I think it has a more earthy, sort of savory, nutty aroma. I think I might actually like this one better. Overall, this smells spot-on, but I think we'll get a better sense of the taste in food. So let's go fry up some batches of fried rice to compare. Before we do that, though, I want to take a quick moment to thank my supporters who helped to make this video possible. If you're learning something new from my recipes and want to help, hit the link in the description down below to see how you can pitch in. Okay, to keep things super simple so we can really taste the difference between the curry powders, I'm just going to be using some day-old rice. So I've got two bowls on either side here. I've got the S&B curry powder on the right, and the gyaban on the left. I'm going to add a little bit of oil, and we're just going to season this with some salt. We've got our pans preheating, and they're getting nice and hot here, so I'm going to go ahead and add the oil into both pans. And then let's go ahead and add the rice in here. All right, the idea here is that you want to warm up the rice while you're kind of toasting the outside a little bit. I've got a recipe for a more proper curry fried rice, so if you want to try making some, look for the link in the description down below. All right, the rice is starting to get nice and warm here, so I'm going to go ahead and sprinkle on some salt. Put about the same amount of salt into this one over here. And I think our rice is hot enough, so I'm going to go ahead and add the curry powder in here. So give a good dose of curry powder to that one. Add our curry powder into this one, and let's see if we can flip these both together. Okay, I'm getting kind of nervous here. Let's go one at a time. Yeah, these smell a little bit different, and it's not in a bad way at all. I'm definitely getting some more turmeric here. I think I'm getting some kind of sour notes from the S&B curry powder as well, whereas the Gaban has a more sort of toasty, nutty aroma. Getting a little bit more like cinnamon and allspice over here. All right, so I think our fried rice is done. I'm going to go ahead and turn off the heat, and let me just grab a spoon here, and I think we can just taste it straight out of the pan. So I'm going to go with sort of the standard, bare S&B curry-flavored fried rice here first. I mean, it tastes like Japanese curry. It's delicious. If I'm going to do this for lunch, I'd probably want to put some ham, maybe some onions, some peas in there or something, but it tastes great. All right, let's go in for the Gaban. Oh, wow. So they weren't so dissimilar in aroma. The taste is totally different. The Gaban actually has more of a curry flavor. Like when I think of Japanese curry, this is what it tastes like. This is really delicious. I think this curry powder is going to work beautifully with my Japanese curry from scratch, as well as my curry udon. So I'll link to both of those recipes in the description down below. If you enjoyed this video and want to see more like it, you can let me know by giving this a big thumbs up and by sharing it with all your friends that love Japanese curry. Well, I think I'm gonna go have the rest of this curry fried rice over at the table, but I'll catch you in the next one.