Garam Masala Recipe: How to Make It at Home

Quick answer

Dry-roast, cool completely, grind fine, store small. That is the whole method, and the cooling step is the one people skip.

The base blend, which makes roughly six tablespoons:

• 2 tbsp coriander seed
• 1 tbsp cumin seed
• 1 tsp black peppercorns
• Seeds from 10 green cardamom pods
• 2 black cardamom pods, whole
• 2 inch piece of cinnamon or cassia bark, snapped up
• 1 tsp whole cloves
• 2 dried bay leaves
• ¼ of a whole nutmeg
• 1 blade of mace, if you have it

Roast over low heat for two to four minutes, until they smell toasted and the cumin darkens a shade. Cool for twenty minutes. Grind. Done.

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There is one good reason to make your own garam masala and it is not authenticity.

It is that ground spices go flat and whole spices do not. A jar of supermarket garam masala was ground in a factory, shipped, warehoused, shelved and then opened in your kitchen, and by the time you use the last of it the blend can be two years past grinding. The whole cardamom pods in a bag on your shelf will still be fragrant in three years.

Grinding your own is not a purist’s exercise. It is the difference between a spice you can smell across a room and one you have to hold up to your face.

The spices, and what each one is doing

You do not need all of these. You do need to know which job you are removing if you leave one out.

Spice	Amount	What it contributes
Coriander seed	2 tbsp	The volume. Mild, citrusy, slightly sweet — it carries everything else
Cumin seed	1 tbsp	The savoury base. Earthy and nutty once roasted
Green cardamom	10 pods, seeds only	The perfume. The single most recognisable note in the blend
Black cardamom	2 pods, whole	Smoke and depth. Powerful — two is plenty
Cinnamon or cassia	2 inch piece	Sweet warmth. Cassia is stronger and darker; either is fine here
Cloves	1 tsp	The sharp medicinal edge. The easiest spice in the list to overdo
Black peppercorns	1 tsp	Almost all of the actual heat
Bay leaf	2 leaves	A herbal lift that stops the blend reading as dessert
Nutmeg	¼ whole	Sweet and woody. Small amount, large effect
Mace	1 blade	Nutmeg’s lacier cousin — finer, more floral

No turmeric, and usually no chilli. Turmeric is what makes curry powder yellow, and it does not belong here. If you want heat, add chilli to the dish rather than to the blend, so you can control the two separately.

The method, properly

1. Roast low, and stop early

Put everything except the nutmeg and mace into a dry pan — no oil — over a low flame. Keep it moving.

You are waiting for the smell to change, not for colour. It takes two to four minutes. The cumin will darken by roughly one shade and the whole pan will start to smell like an Indian restaurant kitchen. That is the moment.

Burnt spices make a bitter blend and there is no fixing it. If the pan smells sharp rather than toasted, or if the cumin has gone properly brown, throw it out and start again. It is a pound of ingredients and twenty minutes; a bitter batch will ruin every dish you use it in for the next three months.

Some cooks roast each spice separately, because a coriander seed and a cinnamon stick do not toast at the same rate. It is better. It is also four times the work, and roasting them together is what most Indian households actually do.

2. Cool completely

Tip the roasted spices onto a cold plate and spread them out. Leave them twenty minutes, until they are properly at room temperature.

This is the step recipes mention in four words and nobody obeys. Two things go wrong if you grind warm spices: they gum up and cake against the grinder wall instead of powdering, and the residual steam condenses inside the storage jar, which is how a blend clumps and loses its life in a fortnight.

Grate the nutmeg now, while you wait. It goes in at the grinding stage rather than the roasting one.

3. Grind fine

An electric coffee grinder kept only for spices is the right tool and costs very little. Twenty seconds in short bursts, shaking it between, gets you a fine even powder.

The feature worth paying for is a removable bowl — this one has a 70g bowl that lifts out — because a fixed-bowl grinder cannot be washed properly, and clove and black cardamom leave a residue that turns the next batch of anything into garam masala. It is also the difference between owning one grinder and needing two. As an Amazon Associate we may earn from qualifying purchases.

Hard items first if your grinder struggles: cinnamon bark, black cardamom pods and nutmeg are what jam a cheap motor. Break the cinnamon into small pieces with the flat of a knife before it goes in.

With a mortar and pestle it is genuinely hard work and the result will be coarser — good, but not the same. Do the hard things first and separately.

4. Store small and dark

A small airtight jar, filled close to the top so there is little air in it, kept in a cupboard rather than on the shelf above the cooker. Heat and light are what finish a ground spice.

Make a batch you will use in three months. Six tablespoons is about right for a household that cooks Indian food weekly.

Punjabi garam masala

This is the default — the blend most people mean, and the one the base recipe above produces. It is savoury and robust, weighted towards cumin, coriander and black cardamom, and always roasted.

To push the base recipe further in that direction: raise the cumin to a tablespoon and a half, use three black cardamom pods rather than two, and add a teaspoon of fennel seed.

It suits weight. Dal makhana, a rich meat curry, chole, anything with cream or tomato that can take a heavy hand.

Kashmiri garam masala

Lighter, floral, and traditionally unroasted — the kaccha style, where the spices are dried in the sun instead of over a flame.

Build it on green cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and fennel, add a teaspoon of dried ginger powder, drop the cumin right back, and leave the black cardamom out entirely. A tablespoon of dried rose petals is traditional and does exactly what it sounds like.

It suits yoghurt. Rogan josh, a pulao, a light chicken curry where a Punjabi blend would sit on top of the dish rather than in it.

The two blends are not interchangeable in the way the shelf suggests. If you cook a lot of Indian food, two small jars is a better use of a cupboard than one large one.

How to use what you have made

Fresh homemade garam masala is stronger than the shop version, sometimes by a lot. Start with half of what a recipe asks for, taste, and add more.

Add it in the last minute of cooking or off the heat entirely. That is the whole point of the blend and it is covered properly on the garam masala hub — the aromatics you just spent twenty minutes preserving will evaporate out of a long simmer.

Half to one teaspoon finishes a dish for four.

What to do with the whole spices you bought

You will have bought more cardamom, cinnamon and cloves than one batch uses. That is fine — they are the four longest-lived things in a spice cupboard and they are all useful on their own.

They are also, individually, worth knowing. Green cardamom, cinnamon, clove, black pepper, cumin and coriander each have their own guides here, and every one of them is doing a specific job in the blend you have just made.