Harvest Homegrown Natural Organic Turmeric and Making Turmeric Powder

Almost 2 years ago, had place a turmeric rhizome, about 2 inches long, into the ground to get turmeric leaves for making rendang.  Over time, the turmeric plant grew and the leaves have been used many times in making chicken rendang.  With the leaves, rendang tastes much better.

Here's a picture of the turmeric plant when it had a flower, this was a first time I had seen a turmeric flower in real life.

Turmeric Plant Flower

Turmeric Plant Flower

The other day, I was planting herbs into the ground, and decided to remove the turmeric plant and was pleasantly surprised to see the growth of the rhizome.  I mean, all I did was place them in the ground and didn't even look after them, just left them there for the leaves and could not believe how much it had grown under ground!

Harvested Turmeric

From 2 inches to this!!!

  

Was wondering how to store the turmeric and went online and read that the best way was to make it into turmeric powder.  Read a bit more on making turmeric powder and was told that needed to boil the rhizome first.

Checked with the the Family Whatsapp group and 2 of my aunts have made turmeric powder before and was told no need to boil the rhizome, just cut them into small pieces and sun dry them.  That is exactly what I did.  Here's the simple process:

1st, clean the rhizomes in a bowl of water.

Just by rubbing the rhizomes with my thumb and fingers they were clean with beautiful bright orange color.

Next, I removed the skin on half of the turmeric and the other half kept the skin on.  Again, look at the beautiful bright orange color. 

Turmeric without the skin

Next I cut them into small pieces and placed them on a old clean t-shirt to sun dry them.

Sun drying turmeric

We were very fortunately as we had 3 days of really strong sun with only evening showers, brought them inside the house before it rained.

A word of caution, everything turns into a beautiful orange, fingers, knife cutting board etc. If you mind the color on your hands, do wear a glove.  Not to worry, after a couple of days, the color goes away from the finger and a scrub of the board removes the color.