Asafoetida (Hing)
Also known as: hing, devil's dung
What Asafoetida (Hing) is
The spice that stands in for onion and garlic in kitchens that cook with neither. Jain, Vaishnav and other sattvic traditions have used it for centuries, and today the same pinch shows up in everyday dal and vegetable dishes far beyond those communities, because a small amount of asafoetida in hot fat produces the savoriness onions would otherwise supply. In a dal tadka it is often the first thing into the ghee, before the cumin. In the tin it smells aggressively of sulfur — hence the old English name devil's dung — and a few seconds of heat turn it into exactly the opposite: a rounded, cooked-onion aroma.
A dried latex tapped from the living root of Ferula assa-foetida and related giant fennels, spindly desert perennials of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. The crown of the root is cut, the gum that seeps out is scraped off and sun-dried, and nearly all of it goes to India, which consumes most of the world's supply. What is sold as hing powder is not pure resin but resin cut with a carrier — traditionally wheat flour, sometimes rice flour — to make a pinch measurable. That carrier is the fact celiacs need: most compounded hing is not gluten-free, and only brands stating a rice carrier are.
Taste profile
Raw, sharply sulfurous — like concentrated garlic and onion with a bitter edge — and never tasted raw on purpose. The technique is a pinch dropped into hot ghee or oil for five to ten seconds at the start of a tempering, before any other ingredient; held even slightly too long it burns acrid and ruins the pot. Cooked correctly it mellows into the leek-and-garlic note that defines it, used in pinches — a quarter teaspoon is the ceiling for a pot of dal, and more turns the dish medicinal. South Indian kitchens know it as perungayam and use it as freely in rasam and kootu as northern kitchens do in dal.
Forms to buy
- Compounded powder — The common form; 100g tins at Indian grocers in Japan, typically a few hundred yen.
- Pure resin lump — Far stronger, used in tiny fragments; the form to seek if a wheat carrier is a problem.
Halal note
The resin itself is plant-derived with no halal concern. The carrier is normally wheat or rice flour, also unproblematic, but a few brands use non-standard carriers or additives — the label is worth checking, the same check celiacs are already making for wheat.