By Leslie Brenner

“Buy the beautiful turmeric roots, grind them up, put them in your food and enjoy it.” That’s the advice Dr. Mahtab Jafari, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California Irvine, recently provided the New York Times, for an article about turmeric’s health benefits.

Most of us, especially here in the West, know turmeric as golden powder that comes in a spice jar, but more and more, we’re seeing it in its root form in supermarket produce sections. Usually it lives near the ginger, its relative. Both are rhizomes.

Ginger is also turmeric’s culinary friend; the two play gorgeously together. And when black pepper joins in the fun, things explode — with deliciousness, and with health power: Piperine, black pepper’s active ingredient, optimizes the bioavailability of curcumin, turmeric’s active ingredient. Curcumin is responsible for turmeric’s proported anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties.

*Organic turmeric in the produce section of a Whole Foods Market in Dallas, Texas*

Health advantages aside, cooks love turmeric because it brings aromatic, earthy warmth and a beautiful golden hue to everything it touches — literally; it’s also used as a dye.

Indian cooks have appreciated and celebrated turmeric for eons; its use has been an important part of Ayurvedic medicine and cooking for more than four thousand years. In the intervening centuries, it has made its way around the globe in both directions, to southeast Asia eastward and the Middle East, Africa and Europe westward.

Now, of course, it’s everywhere.

Here in the United States, turmeric in its root form is becoming more and more available. Turmeric root is a “rising star” in the American organic farming world, with most of the crop coming from Hawaii, and some from California and Oregon. You’ll generally find it November through July, so yes, ’tis the season, to trot out the threadbare cliché.

Cooking with fresh turmeric

Turmeric root may be popping up everywhere, but enticing recipes using it aren’t exactly a dime a dozen.

Happily, you can swap fresh turmeric root in for ground turmeric in many recipes. (Ground turmeric is the rhizome that has been dried, then ground.) To use it, just peel it (with a vegetable parer, paring knife or your fingernail), then grate it, and use it much like you would ginger. Most sources say to use three times as much fresh as you would ground. If a recipe calls for a teaspoon of ground turmeric, go ahead and grate a tablespoon of fresh. You can stir it into soups, braises and curries.

Or use it to make golden milk — an Indian treat (haldi doodh in Hindi) that’s also sipped to sooth colds or sore throats. The basic ingredients are milk (cow’s milk or nut milk), turmeric and honey; some people add ginger, black pepper or other spices. Want to try it? Put 250 ml / 8 ounces of almond (or other) milk in a small saucepan with a generous teaspoon and a half of grated turmeric, five or six grinds of black pepper and a teaspoon (or more) of honey. Stir to combine, bring the mixture to a simmer over medium heat, remove from the heat and let it infuse, covered, for five minutes. Strain it through a fine-mesh strainer into a cup or cups, moving the solids around with a spoon so the infused milk flows through, and enjoy.

Fresh turmeric enlivens a vegan curry

Want to try it in a dinner dish? Inspired by a recipe for a curry of chickpeas and kale by the British food writer Meera Soda, I put together one using fresh turmeric instead of ground, and adding a generous dose of freshly ground black pepper. To start, I made a paste of grated turmeric root, ginger and garlic, which got stirred into onions browned in virgin coconut oil. Ground cumin and coriander went in next, followed by chickpeas (from a can — for an easy weeknight vibe), a can of diced tomatoes, cayenne pepper, water, salt, the black pepper, and finally a lot of lacinato kale. That all gets simmered till the kale is tender.

My family loved it; I served it with sweet potatoes roasted till they were seeping caramel — a really nice match. I’m thinking we’ll have an encore soon.

RECIPE: Chickpea and Kale Curry

RECIPE: Chickpea and Kale Curry with Fresh Turmeric and Ginger

I haven’t yet played with swapping fresh turmeric for ground in some of my favorite turmeric-happy recipes; I’ll let you know when I do! Surely it will be wonderful in my favorite vegan lentil soup.