Walk into a kitchen in the Kumaon hills and look at the shelf above the stove. There will be turmeric and chilli, which you expected. There will also be a few small jars of things that do not turn up in a normal spice rack: tiny black seeds, a grey-green dried herb, a pinch of numbing pepper. Most of our food customers came to us for one of those jars.
Timur: the pepper that hums
Timur (Zanthoxylum armatum) is the Himalayan cousin of Sichuan pepper. It is not hot in the chilli sense. It makes your lips buzz and your tongue go a little numb, then fades into a citrus note. Chefs who already cook with Sichuan pepper tend to understand it in one bite. We have written a full buyer's guide to timur, so we will not repeat it here.
Jakhya and faran: the tempering seeds
Jakhya is a small black seed fried in hot oil at the start of a dal or a vegetable dish. It crackles, smells a little like mustard and cumin together, and that smell is the signature of Garhwali home cooking. Faran, also sold as jambu, is a dried allium herb that does the work of an onion-garlic hybrid in a tempering. Both are almost unknown outside the region, which makes them interesting for restaurants and specialty brands and tough for a supermarket buyer. Know which of those you are.
Bhangjeera and the seed side of the shelf
Perilla seeds, locally bhangjeera, are ground into a tangy, nutty chutney that tastes a little like sesame and a little like something else. We also carry kuth and kapur kachri (Hedychium spicatum), used in traditional recipes and in fragrance. Kapur kachri comes as chips or whole.
Pahadi salt, stone-ground
Pisyu loon, or pahadi salt, is salt that has been crushed on a stone with something else: garlic, lime, timur, heeng (asafoetida), jakhya or choru. Ours come in six flavours. It is the easiest item on this list to put in front of a shopper, because everyone understands salt. A small jar with a good label sells itself at a tasting counter.
The usual trade questions apply: what is the base salt, what is the ratio, what does the label say, and what are the shelf life and packaging. We will give you what we know and flag what we do not.
Turmeric, ginger and the black turmeric question
Our high-curcumin yellow turmeric powder is the volume line on the list: a straightforward product, easy to price and easy to compare, which is exactly why you should ask for a test report rather than trust a number on a brochure. See our note on buying turmeric powder wholesale for what to check.
Ginger powder (sonth) and pahadi ginger slices come from hill ginger. Black turmeric (kali haldi, Curcuma caesia) is sold as powder and as rhizome, and the planting rhizome is its own SKU. If you plan to grow rather than cook with it, say so when you ask for a quote.
A few honest notes
Flavour varies with the harvest, so a jar sampled in spring may not taste exactly like one packed in autumn. Some of these spices are hard to describe on a label, so we help customers with recipe cards and plain-English copy. And we do not make health claims for any of them. They are seasonings.
You can find every item on the catalogue. If you are a chef, a spice blender or a private-label brand and one of these caught your eye, send us a note through the quotation form.