Hello, and welcome savor protection of iHeart Radio.
I'm any Reason and I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and today we have an episode for you about the curry tree.
Yes, my ohm, I was there any particular reason this was on your mind? Lauren?
Was there? Oh? Heck, I don't know. I don't think.
So that's interesting because I actually hadn't really heard about this. I can't say I haven't had it, but I haven't the curry leaf anyway, but I haven't knowingly had it.
I've definitely had it in spice blends, and I strongly believe that I've consumed it in food that other the restaurants have cooked for me. So but yeah, no, I've certainly not had it fresh, and I don't have any in my house. And now this is one of those episodes where I am craving so many things that I have never consumed, and I really need to get my hands on some.
Yes, it sounds so bright and delightful. It sounds like something I would really love. So I'm sad that I can't find it anywhere. But no, I haven't given up hope.
Okay, Okay, yeah.
Yes, Well I guess that brings us to our question, sure, the curry tree, what is it?
Well, the curry tree is a tree that grows aromatic leaves that can be used as an herb to flavor all kinds of usually savory dishes. The leaves are these like small pointed ovals, dark green in color, with the citrus herbal, bitter, earthy, nutty sort of flavor. When they're young and tender, they can be chopped and eaten fresh and salads and dips, or cooked into soups, stews, fries,
rice pilluffs, breads, and sauces. When they're older and tougher, they can be cooked with a dish and then taken out for serving, and can also be dried and powdered and used however you like. Dried curry leaves do sometimes go into spice blends such as massalas. In English. We often call those curry powders, but they contain more than just curry leaves, and commonly don't contain curry leaves at all.
Anyway.
It's a kind of flavor combination from what I understand, that you almost don't believe exists in a single plant, because it's so zesty and earthy at the same time. Like if you could take the iridescence of a butterfly's wings or a crow's feathers and make it a flavor.
Oh that sounds so lovely.
Really need to track some fresh ones down.
I'm like this close to like to like trying to imp or a curry tree plant and seeing if I can get it to grow indoors.
I'm not sure about the legality in my area here.
We are okay, only import plants legally, friends, It's important for your ecosystem anyway. The curry tree is a member of the rue family, a cousin to citrus. It's a tropical to subtropical big shrub or small tree, depending on your personal definition. It can grow to about twenty feet that's six meters in height, with a slender trunk and a leafy crown. Different varieties have been developed with slightly
different leaf sizes and flavors. They are evergreen and tropical climates, but will drop their leaves over the winter in cooler climates. The curry tree is not to be confused with the curry leaf plant, which is an herb that looks a little bit like like silvery rosemary and apparently smells strongly of like bitter sagey maybe curry leaves, but more like bitter sage and it is not often used in cooking,
but okay, curry trees. They bloom with these fragrant white flowers and will produce small berries that ripe into a deep purple black in color and do taste sweet. But they don't really produce enough fruit for humans to bother with. I do understand that they're sometimes eaten fresh locally, and if you do get a hold of some, note that you should not eat the seeds. They can cause a toxic reaction. The trees can be grown from those seeds, but the roots will also put off a little suckers
that will grow into saplings. Those leaves can be sold fresh or frozen, or dried or processed into powder. The fragrant oils can also be extracted and used as flavoring or in the personal care industry and cosmetic soap stuff like that. I understand that when they're fresh, they yeah have this like pungent peppery lemon grass bergamot annis like
mintea resiny nutty flavor. When they're dried, it sort of flattens out to like an earthy, bright herbal kind of combination, and when using the fresh leaves, cooks will usually remove the stems and then saute the leaves and some kind of fat like oil or ghee which is clarified butter, in order to release all of those flavor oils, and then use both the leaves and the fat in whatever way.
Fats that have been flavored with herbs and spices like this is the base of a lot of savory recipes from South India and surrounding cuisines, and sometimes those crispy fried leaves are used to garnish dishes sort of like a fried sage leaves sounds so good?
Yes, yes.
The leaves can also be used in teas and other drinks like a sippable yogurt kind of situations, and in the United States you can often find them fresh at grocers that cater to South Indian and more broadly, I guess South Asian populations like Patel Brothers. If you've got one of those in your town, We've got a.
We're going to have to go on an adventure, Lauren, I think.
I'm into it.
Yes, more food adventures always always Well, what about the nutrition you're not typically eating enough to make a real caloric difference, But curry leaves do contain lots of minerals and vitamins other micronutrients. You get more from fresh than
from dried. That being said, the leaves and all other parts of the tree have been used in traditional areavatic medicine for a long time for a number of purposes, and research has found compounds that have shown potential in animal studies and in vitro in the lab to protect cardiovascular function and brain function and to have like anti inflammatory and pain relief properties. But that's all been with extracts, and again in animals and in vitro, not in humans.
So you know, savor motto. More research is necessary because bodies are implicated and nutrition is complicated, and before you consume medicinal amounts of anything, you should check with a medical care provider who is not us, because we're not that. That's not what we are, that's not what we're about, that's not what we have the training to be. No, no, nope,
Well we've got a number for you. Kind of This is one of the ones where I couldn't figure out if I was using the wrong keywords in the wrong language, or if Google was returning things to me as like an American English speaker in an annoying way, or if it's just the kind of thing that, like crop numbers aren't really reported on that widely because it's more a homegrown, community grown kind of spice.
Or orbb et, cetera.
But I can tell you that in environments where curry trees are evergreen, you can harvest from the trees once every three months, up to every three months in trees that are older than five years of age.
Yes, well, listeners, please write in if you have any more information, because a lot of the things I read were very personal stories of trying to get a curry tree or transported curry tree, or find where they could purchase it, people could purchase it. So listeners, please let us know. Oh yeah, but we do have a history of sorts for you.
We do, and we're going to get into that as soon as we get back from a quick break for word from our sponsors.
And we're back. Thank you sponsor, Yes, thank you, so yes. Going back to Lauren's point, the reason I said a history of sorts is because unfortunately a lot of times we're talking about something that is maybe not as popular in the United States or in the Western world, that the history or the research is not as easily found. And I tried a bunch of different terms because this tree does go by a bunch of different terms. So once again, listeners, if you have any information, please let
us know. We would love to look into it further and shout it out. Oh yeah, But that being said, historians believe the curry tree is indigenous to modern day India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. As early as the first century CE. Records indicate that people that lived where the tree was grown were using the leaves to flavor their food, though some suggest it was being used as early as sixth century BCE. They were also being used medicinally for all kinds of things. Pretty early on. It was quite a
long list. Immigration and trade introduced curry leaves to places like South Africa and Malaysia. Over time, the leaves were integrated into all kinds of dishes in India, particularly in South and West India and other areas that it grew or was available, as well as things like cosmetics and
hygiene products like soap. In the eighteenth century, the British, who had a colonial presence in India allegedly invented curry powder to mimic Indian flavors outside of India, And yeah, these powders sometimes included ground up curry leaves, but not always, and even when they did, the flavor was largely lost. From what I've read. For a good long while, the curry tree and its leaves remained fairly local to the places it had historically been grown, with a few pockets
of Indian immigrants in other countries. And as I mentioned, there are lobtails of the difficulties of transporting the tree to a new home, the anxiety of losing.
Yeah, yeah, this important colony, this important part of your culinary tradition. Yeah, and they are a little bit tricky to grow from seed. Cuttings are easier to get going, but they're also more difficult to transport.
So yeah, I actually really recommend reading them because it's something we've talked about before. But when you have a plant that you just are like, please don't die, but need you, yeah, do everything you can, it just means a lot to you, of.
Course, I mean, you know, aside from it being a living thing and just wanting to care for something and not you know, let it down, right, but.
Especially for something like this where you might not be able to get these curry leaves so easily. So if you're curry tree dies, yeah, yeah, it's an important part of your food way, sure, exactly. That being said, with the growing interest in trying new things in places the US to Indian food in general, and increased exposure to the ingredient through medium, more and more people who have
never tried it before previously are seeking it out. Other cuisines have started incorporating these leaves into dishes as well, so it's one of those things that's getting a lot more recognition. But I would still say, as I mentioned, I haven't heard of it, so a long way to go, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah, I can't recall ever seeing it in a grocery store, but to be fair, I haven't been looking for it, so there you go. One issue here has been that curry trees are carriers of a couple pests and diseases that can affect other tropical crop trees like their citrus cousins. Citrus greening disease is the big one. It's a bacterial infection that's spread by insects. It can ruin a citrus crop and there's no cure for it, like you just have to prevent the bugs from spreading it or kind
of like burn everything down. So in the United States, for example, there have been some regulations put in place about growing and shipping curry leaf trees in and among states that do have significant citrus crops, like like California and Florida, which are also basically where curry trees would grow best. But yeah, like there's this obvious and only increasing interest in curry leaves, so certainly since the turn of the twenty first century that there's been a bunch
of research into how to integrate curry trees into the agriculture. Here, I read that there are somewhat popular crop in parts of Hawaii.
Once again, listeners, let us know. But also in more recent times there have been concerns around over harvesting, sustainability, and climate change. In response to that those things, there are efforts to educate and research ways to preserve and sustain the curry tree, which of course is very important if we're talking about more people using it cuisine or it's spreading around. So yeah, yep, and that's unfortunately what I could find. It's a shorter history section. But I
don't know. I hope that. I hope there's more written about it, and maybe I just couldn't find it, yeah in English, or maybe people are just so used to it where it is that they I don't know, it's ubiquitous or something.
Yeah.
Yeah, I did read a few references to the leaves being used in different cultural practices, ceremonies, things like that, but I couldn't really follow I couldn't follow up on any of those leads with anything that seemed concrete, so I didn't want to include it.
But yes, absolutely, if.
You have any personal history with Curly, we would love to hear about it.
Yes, absolutely. In the meantime, that is what we have to say about Curry Tree and Curry Leaves for now.
We do already have some listener mail for you, though, and we're going to get into that as soon as we get back from one more quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And we're back. Thank you sponsor, Yes, thank you, and we're back with listener.
Yeah.
It's like a bright I don't know why, I just have in my head that it's like a bright flavor. But hopefully one day I can try it.
Yeah, yeah, kind of citrusy, so there you go.
Yeah, Okay. I'm so excited to share this because it was It features in an episode we had done a while back that I'd kind of put out of my mind, and now I'm angry at myself that I had because it was joyous. So Judy wrote, first of all, thank you for this Easter's podcast about Torda pascadina. It sounds like the perfect Easter main dish for my vegetarian grandson, and I have saved some recipes to try it for next year. I'm behind on my podcast, so I heard
this too late for this year. A year or two ago, your Easter podcast was about lamb cake. I wrote you about my family tradition of making a lamb cake out of red velvet cake so it looks like roadkill inside, and decapitating it for my son, whose birthday is always near Easter, and giving him the head to eat. You even read my letter in the show. This year, my daughter once again made the cake using her grandmother's original pans,
which we figure are over seventy years old. As usual, my son got the head and his children argued over which of them would get the backside which had the most frosting. I am attaching three pictures for your amusement. One is the cake before we cut it. My youngest grandchild thought it was a puppy. The second is the cake after the head and all the nether regions had been served. The last is my son's new way to
eat the head. He scooped out the brains. As you can see, the humor over here is a bit twisted, but we do have a good time, all right. Okay, a couple things. Number one listeners, if you haven't heard this episode, you must be one. You must have several questions.
If you did not grow up with the tradition of making a lamb shaped cake around Easter.
That's a thing that occurs, and it's wondrous, and you need to look up pictures immediately.
Uh huh. Yes, that they range in appearance from.
Glorious to real goofy to terrifying to quite terrifying. Yes, this one, I would say, is on the goofy, on the goofy side, little little white white lamb, a little bit googly in the eyes, little heart shaped nose. It doesn't not resemble a puppy.
I can see the puppy I can see. Don't know, I don't know if I would have put that together without you mentioning it, but right, I see the puppy. There's also, yes, an image of the scooped out brains.
That's the right, the decapitated cake head on a plate with the brains having been the brains having been scooped out.
Yeah, and the and the rompe removed. I do appreciate that people were fighting over it because it had the most rousting that. You know, you've got to have your priority, you.
Do, you do.
And I appreciate how much each slice must look like a steak when you played it, because of the white icing relatively resembling a fat cap and the red of the cake.
It's absolutely, it's excellent, it's beautiful, it's fantastic. And this is certainly a humor that Lauren and I can get on board with.
Oh yeah, yeah, if you couldn't tell.
Yes, absolutely.
So thank you, yes, thank you so much for sharing. Let us know next year if you work out a torta pascalina recipe. Ye, oh god, I really need to really need to make one of those. How I'm hungry today. Okay, here we are EJ wrote, I thought I wouldn't be writing to you for a while, but then you suddenly hit us with a chata episode. As with most of my email, I'll start with a short anecdote about your latest episode before it inevitably veers into another food story.
That pattern isn't going anywhere. About ten years ago, some friends invited me to go shatake picking in the mountains of the rural Japanese town we lived in at the time. I love shatake, though back then I was more familiar with the dried kind with its rich umami that works well in Chinese dishes, but I mostly used it as the main protein in a cream based pasta I flavored with star Annis. It took us almost an hour to
find the meeting spot. When we finally arrived, we met the other participants, mother and daughter, and our guide, a sweet, elderly gentleman. At the time, our Japanese was pretty limited and the guide's gruff rural dialect didn't help. Still, we got by with what we knew and a bit of
nonverbal communication. He led us to the mushrooms, which were growing in a forested area behind some houses on the mountain side until then I'd always imagine shitake to be about two inches across, but we weren't prepared for the size of these things. To this day, I'm not one hundred percent sure they were all chatake. The smaller ones, which were still pretty big, definitely were I guess the
rest had just been left to grow wild. The guide also pointed out some seasonal fruits, and soon we were picking per simmons and figs too. They cooked some of the mushrooms and fruits we picked and had ourselves a little picnic. They also offered wild boarn meat, which was delicious. One of my friends, a vegetarian at well pescatarian in Japan since dashi is hard to avoid, even had a bite. She said, I've never had wild boar before, and I
don't know if we'll ever get another chance. Then the guide excitedly told us that one of his friends had just caught a bore and asked if we wanted to see it. We were taken to a shack behind a house where a majestic boar lay on its back halfway through being skinned. We didn't know quite what was going on until they handed each of us a knife. So there we were, including my vegetarian friend, unsure what to do, but helping butcher a wild boar, we just did our
best hakuna matata. I guess they offered us some meat to take home. My friends weren't sure what to do with it, so I ended up with about two kilos of wild boar for free. I don't really remember what I did with the chitake. I think I made a lot of omelets that week. The boar meat eventually became a smoky chocolate chili concarne, which was a big hit at our next movie night. PS here's the vegetarian in her natural habitat. She shared her thoughts on the whole experience.
This wild boar had lived freely and just happened to be caught, which felt consistent with the natural order of things. She said she wished all food could be sourced as ethically as this, and attached photos are of a mushroom cap that is the size of this lady's head. It is quite a large mushroom cap. And then a basket
of all those look lovely. Oh my goodness, just really just really like if a hob bit new where those were growing, you would have to watch your watch, your stash because they would absolutely be on that.
Yes, yes, I also have to say shout out for using hakuna matata. Yeah, talk to you about butchering a wild boar. I'm sure Pumba would appreciate. Yeah, appreciate that. But this sounds lovely. This whole experience sounds really lovely. And getting to getting this kind of surprise wild boar situation.
Oh yeah right right, like not only not only mushroom foraging, but then you also get like like per simmons and figs and wild boar and a little picnic. Oh it all sounds and a free butchering class.
Yes you know all these things. But also yeah, it's the things that you made with the omelets, the smoky chocolate chili concarne. That sounds delicious. But it is nice when you hopefully are participating in the food ways in a.
Way like this. Yeah, that feels more responsible and more ethical perfor Yeah yeah, but it looks it looks delicious.
Thank you for sharing.
Yes, yes, oh so much. I'm so hungry.
Okay, well, thank you through both of these listeners for writing in. If you would like to write to us, you can. Our email is Hello at savorpod. Dot com.
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For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you can visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or where never you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our super producers Dylan Fagan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening, and we hope that let's work. Good things are coming your way